Building safe MCP servers for your PostgreSQL database

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol that describes how agents can connect to external tools and data sources, and is now widely supported by the most popular coding agents (like GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Codex) and agent frameworks (like LangChain and Pydantic AI). If you want to give agents a standard way to access the data in a database, you can build your own MCP server and expose tools for the agent to query or even modify data. But you need to design your MCP server carefully, to ensure that agents can do everything that users want - but nothing that you don't want them to do! In this blog post, we'll walk through the range of ways to build MCP servers on top of a PostgreSQL database, since PostgreSQL is the most popular open source database and is production-ready with hosted offerings like Azure Database for PostgreSQL. You can apply these same principles to any database, however. There's a spectrum of ways to build MCP servers on top of a database. We'll…