Following the Token: A Practical Guide to OAuth in PostgreSQL

OpenID Connect promises passwordless authentication, centralized identity management, and seamless integration with enterprise identity providers. In practice, that seamlessness often disappears once multiple systems are involved.

Unlike traditional password authentication, OAuth involves multiple components: clients, identity providers, validators, cryptographic signatures, network communication, and PostgreSQL itself. When authentication fails, the error message often appears far away from the actual problem, while the client intentionally receives only limited information.

In this session we’ll follow an authentication request from login to a successful database connection, exploring the most common failure scenarios along the way. We’ll learn how to determine where authentication failed, why it failed, and how to fix it.

Rather than focusing on theory, this talk is built around practical troubleshooting techniques. After this talk, you’ll know how to trace an authentication attempt through the entire OAuth flow and identify where things went wrong.