Data Masking in MySQL

• Supporting MySQL 8.0
• High performance on large data sets
• Automate Data Masking in CI/CD pipelines
• Including Synthetic Data Generation
• Preserve data characteristics

What is data masking in MySQL

Part of your MySQL test data management (TDM) is or should be data masking or data obfuscation. The anonymization of privacy sensitive data is an important aspect of the data protection inside your MySQL databases. Since you can’t use personally identifiable information (PII) in your CI/CD pipeline, this data needs to be hidden in some way. A data discovery tool can help to detect where sensitive data is stored (which tables, columns or rows) so you know which data needs to be masked and secured. It’s undeniable: security is one of the most important aspects in software development, so you have to do something.

Data masking tools MySQL

Many organizations use MySQL databases because of its low costs and simple setup process. It is a good option for smaller businesses or organizations that don’t have a large or sophisticated data team, but smaller business need data masking too. The enterprise edition of MySQL has a data masking feature which certainly will suffice when you only have a few rows of data. If your data model is more complex, the data masking quickly becomes a time-consuming task. You would benefit a lot from a professional (and fast) anonymization tool.

DATPROF Privacy is a realible MySQL database masking tool, since it supports all major relational (sql) databases natively, MySQL included, and it can be used to mask consistently over a chain of databases/applications. With DATPROF Privacy you can easily anonymize data, scramble privacy sensitive data and/or generate synthetic test data for MySQL instances. We dare to say it might even be the most user-friendly data masking tool there is for MySQL users. Thanks to this tool you can create a masked environment easily, containing logical, realistic data. Data characteristics, relastionships and formats are preserved while the original data is obfuscated.

How to do data masking in MySQL

A data masking tool for MySQL assists you in defining masking rules on (or apply synthetic data rules for) tables and columns that contain PII data. Thanks to predefined rules you easily and quickly build a masking template which you can execute and reuse at the push of a button (or automated in your MySQL CI/CD Pipeline with our TDM portal DATPROF Runtime). Within a few mouse clicks sensitive information like social security number, IBAN and other production data is replaced with random numbers, generated values or any other anonymized data.

MySQL data masking example

Watch our technical product demonstration to see a MySQL data masking tutorial. DATPROF Privacy can connect directly to your MySQL database to mask and generate data. Some commonly used masking and generation techniques in MySQL are shown in this demo. Download your 14 day free trial to see the data masking result in your own database!