Re: Default Roles (was: Additional role attributes)

Stephen,

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 9:22 PM, Fujii Masao <masao(dot)fujii(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 3:46 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> > Fujii,
> >
> > * Fujii Masao (masao(dot)fujii(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> >> he documents of the functions which the corresponding default roles
> >> are added by this patch need to be updated. For example, the description
> >> of pg_xlog_replay_pause() says "Pauses recovery immediately (restricted
> >> to superusers).". I think that the description needs to mention
> >> the corresponding default role "pg_replay". Otherwise, it's difficult for
> >> users to see which default role is related to the function they want to use.
> >> Or probably we can add the table explaining all the relationships between
> >> default roles and corresponding operations. And it's useful.
> >
> > Certainly, totally agree that we need to make it clear in the function
> > descriptions also.
> >
> >> Why do we allow users to change the attributes of default roles?
> >> For example, ALTER ROLE default_role or GRANT ... TO default_role.
> >> Those changes are not dumped by pg_dumpall. So if users change
> >> the attributes for some reasons but they disappear via pg_dumpall,
> >> maybe the system goes into unexpected state.
> >
> > Good point. I'm fine with simply disallowing that completely; does
> > anyone want to argue that we should allow superusers to ALTER or GRANT
> > to these roles? I have a hard time seeing the need for that and it
> > could make things quite ugly.
> >
> >> I think that it's better to allow the roles with pg_monitor to
> >> execute pgstattuple functions. They are usually used for monitoring.
> >> Thought?
> >
> > Possibly, but I'd need to look at them more closely than I have time to
> > right now. Can you provide a use-case? That would certainly help.
>
> I have seen the monitoring system which periodically executes
> the statement like
>
> SELECT * FROM pgstattuple('hoge');
>
> to monitor the relation's physical length, the number of dead
> tuples, etc. Then, for example, if the number of dead tuples is
> increased unexpectedly and the relation becomes bloated, DBA tries
> to find out the cause and execute the maintenance commands
> if necessary to alleviate the situation. The monitoring system calls
> pgstattuple() at off-peak times because pgstattuple() needs to
> scan all the pages in the relation and its performance penalty
> might be big.
>
> > Also, we are mostly focused on things which are currently superuser-only
> > capabilities, if you don't need to be superuser today then the
> > monitoring system could be granted access using the normal mechanisms.
>
> Currently only superusers can call pgstattuple().

Will there be any work on this patch for this commit fest or not? This
is being carried around for a couple of months now with not much
progress. This thread is idle for 4 months now.
--
Michael