Best practices for database masking techniques to protect sensitive data in test environments

ryan_tech
Sat, 19 Apr 2025 14:41:25 +0000

Consider the performance impact of masking large PLM databases. We have a 4TB production database and initial masking attempts took 36+ hours, making weekly test refreshes impractical. We optimized by implementing incremental masking - only masking changed records since the last refresh rather than the entire database. We also parallelized masking operations across multiple database schemas. For frequently accessed tables like PART_MASTER and SUPPLIER_DATA, we maintain pre-masked copies that get synchronized nightly. This reduced our masking window from 36 hours to 6 hours, making regular test environment updates feasible.