Why switch?
pg_dump scripts for Subveil.Shell scripts rot with every migration. Enterprise platforms cost a fortune and take months to land. Subveil is one binary that understands your schema.
Pick who you're comparing against.
| Capability | Custom scriptsBash & Python | Enterprise toolsDelphix / Redgate | SubveilSingle Go binary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foreign key handling | Hand-ordered; breaks when tables change | Supported | Automatic topological sort, cycles resolved |
| Survives schema migrations | Brittle: every migration risks a broken script | Re-profiling and manual rule upkeep | Re-introspects on every run; drift check in CI |
| Time to first masked slice | Days to write, ongoing to maintain | Long, sales-led setup | Minutes: go install, init, pull |
| Cost to adopt | Free, paid in engineer time | Enterprise licensing and services | Open-source CLI |
| Deploy footprint | Glue of bash, Python and cron | Heavy platform and dedicated infrastructure | One static Go binary |
| Consistent masking across tables and services | Random per run; joins drift | Supported | Deterministic HMAC |
| Raw PII leaves your network | Depends on the script | Depends on deployment | Never: runs locally or in your CI (zero-trust) |
| Audit evidence | None | Supported | Cryptographic receipt per sync |
Competitor characteristics are general and vary by product, edition and deployment. Verify against current vendor documentation.
Under the hood
Subveil reads your foreign keys and builds a dependency graph, then orders tables so every parent is loaded before its children. Row selection follows the same edges, so a slice includes exactly the rows it references and no dangling keys. Add a table or column and the order updates itself on the next run.
Self-references and mutual foreign keys have no valid linear order. Subveil detects each cycle, loads rows with the cyclic column deferred, then patches the references in a second pass, so the restore never fails on a constraint.
-- employees.manager_id → employees.id (self-referential)-- pass 1: insert rows, deferring the cyclic FKINSERT INTO employees (id, name, manager_id) VALUES (1, 'A', NULL), (2, 'B', NULL);-- pass 2: patch the references once every row existsUPDATE employees SET manager_id = 1 WHERE id = 2;Values are masked with a keyed HMAC, so the same input always yields the same fake output. Joins, uniqueness and cross-service lookups keep working, and without your key the mapping can't be reversed.
users.email [email protected] → [email protected]billing.contact [email protected] → [email protected]analytics.user [email protected] → [email protected]