Re: Scheduler in Postgres

"Guy Rouillier" <guyr(at)masergy(dot)com> writes:
>> Not to mention SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION.

> Chris, all the options you mention require the entry of a password, or
> for SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION, that the original connection was made by
> a superuser (which in turn would have required entry of a password.)
> It's possible to circumvent this with trust authentication, but the
> PostgreSQL documentation recommends against general use of trust
> authentication (and I agree with that recommendation in a production
> environment.)

> As described in other messages in this thread, putting a scheduler in
> the database would allow authentication to be done at the time the job
> is set up, and then the job to be run without reauthorization.

I think this is really a content-free argument. An outside-the-database
cron substitute would have to have superuser privileges so that it could
do SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION, but so what? If the DBA doesn't want to
cooperate in setting up a scheduler, he probably doesn't want his users
to use an inside-the-database one either.

There aren't really any permissions or security issues here that
weren't solved long ago. People have been using cron jobs driving
connect-as-superuser scripts to do periodic pg_dump and vacuum
maintenance since forever. An outside-the-database scheduler for user
tasks is a straightforward increment on that.

regards, tom lane