Re: Role syntax (or, SQL99 versus sanity)

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 12:29:22PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> One objection to this is that misspelling a privilege keyword would
> give you a complaint about "unknown role", which might be a bit
> confusing; but I suspect we cannot avoid that anyway --- there is
> absolutely no basis on which we can say that
>
> GRANT INSIRT TO joe;

This alone makes me want to ditch the SQL99 syntax... IMHO there should
be a definative way to differentiate between a role grant and a
privilege grant. But I tend to agree that supporting SQL99 is a good
thing, so...

How horrid would it be to support both SQL99 and the suggested GRANT
ROLE syntax, possible with a means to turn off the SQL99 syntax. This
would allow catching typo'd GRANT privilege statements. Another
possibility is to support GRANT, GRANT ROLE, and GRANT PRIVILEGE, and
strongly suggest that users use the latter 2 and not the first one.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant decibel(at)decibel(dot)org
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