Databases are notoriously fussy to work with. Postgres is no exception. Though the software itself may be pretty solid, stuff like major version upgrades or migrations to “the cloud” (or back to on-prem) are really tricky to do without significant and costly downtime. Though there’s tools out there to make this process easier, many of these simply don’t work for anything more than small test databases, and will silently corrupt tables or fail spectacularly in real-world scenarios.

Having separate credentials to log onto a server and access a database on that network is a pain. Why not provide users just one set of credentials for both services? This is a quick how-to guide on how to setup LDAP authentication for MariaDB. As it turns out it’s insanely easy to setup. (The official MariaDB documentation on the subject can be quite hard to find however - which may or may not be the primary reason for this blog post…).