| title | PII Masking |
|---|---|
| icon | EyeOff |
| description | Redact, null, or hash sensitive columns in agent results. Applied in flight, so your app sees real values and the agent never does. |
Masking rewrites sensitive column values in an agent's results before they leave the wire. You name the columns to protect and choose how to mask each one. Your application keeps reading the real values on its own connection. The agent receives masked data it can still join and group on, but never the raw value.
pgbeam policies create --name analytics \
--mask users.email=hash \
--mask users.ssn=redact \
--mask users.phone=nullIn the dashboard, add masking rules on the policy profile under Masking.
| Kind | Text-format result | Binary-format result | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
redact |
A fixed token, e.g. [redacted] |
NULL |
Free-text fields the agent must not read. |
hash |
SHA-256 hex of the value | NULL |
Joinable identifiers (email, user key). |
null |
Empty / NULL |
NULL |
Columns the agent should ignore entirely. |
hash keeps the same input mapping to the same output, so an agent can still
join and group on the column without ever seeing the cleartext.
Masking is applied at serve time on the result path, for agent sessions only. It runs whether the result comes from your database or from PgBeam's cache: the cache keeps raw bytes, and each connection's policy decides what it sees. Your application's passthrough connection is never masked.
Binary-format result columns are masked to `NULL` to stay type-safe; text-format columns get a redaction token or hash. When a query computes an expression over a masked column (for example `lower(email)`), PgBeam masks by the output column name as a conservative extra net. Allowlist the columns you expose and mask the ones you must protect.Masking and allowlists work together. Allow a column so the agent can join and group on it, and mask it so the agent never reads the raw value.