On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 11:32:01PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > Stephen Frost <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > The following patch implements individual privileges for TRUNCATE, > > VACUUM and ANALYZE. Includes documentation and regression test > > updates. Resolves TODO item 'Add a separate TRUNCATE permission'. > > > At least the 'no one interested has written a patch' argument is gone > > now, fire away with other comments/concerns. :) > > I have a very serious problem with the idea of inventing individual > privilege bits for every maintenance command in sight. That does not > scale. How will you handle "GRANT ADD COLUMN", or "GRANT ADD COLUMN > as-long-as-its-not-SERIAL-because-I-dont-want-you-creating-sequences", > or "GRANT ALTER TABLE RELIABILITY" as soon as someone writes that patch, > or a dozen other cases that I could name without stopping for breath? > > The proposed patch eats three of the five available privilege bits (that > is, available without accepting the distributed cost of enlarging ACL > bitmasks), and you've made no case at all why we should spend that > limited resource in this particular fashion.
We rely heavily on truncate as delete for large numbers of rows is very costly. An example, we copy_in batches of rows from several sources through the day to a "pending work" table, with another process periodically processing the rows and sweeping them into a history table. The sweep leaves an empty "pending work" table. Truncate is very efficient for this pattern. However it means that all our jobs have to run with more permissions than they really should have as there is no way to grant "truncate". If giving truncate its very own permission is too wasteful of permission bits, perhaps having truncate be the same as "delete" for permissions purposes would work. Alternatively a separate "whole table operations" permision might cover truncate and some of the alter type things too. Of course table owner does this, but that is what I don't want everyone to be require to have. -dg -- David Gould [EMAIL PROTECTED] If simplicity worked, the world would be overrun with insects. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
