Re: Proposal: access control jails (and introduction as aspiring GSoC student)

Disclaimer: the following is only my view on the matter and is not meant
as representative of the project views, which are reached through
discussion and consensus. IOW, my 2¢.

Joseph Adams <joeyadams3(dot)14159(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Perhaps we could have some sort of LET statement that allows the
> client to pass data to the server, then have libpq automatically wrap
> queries with the LET statement (when necessary). Here's what it would
> look like to the PHP scripter:

My first reaction reading this would be to keep the idea but extend the
WITH syntax instead, so you'd have

WITH BINDINGS bob AS (
current_user = 'bob'
)
SELECT answer FROM secrets WHERE user=current_user AND question=$1;

That said, you can already (as of 8.4) do the following:

WITH bob(name) AS (
SELECT 'bob'
)
SELECT answer FROM secrets, bob WHERE user=bob.name AND question=$1;

The syntax WITH bob(current_user) is not possible because of the
standard using current_user as a keyword (IIUC), but you get the idea.

> Granted, it would be silly to pass the value itself to the server over
> and over, so a serious implementation would probably pass a context
> ID, and these variable assignments would live in the backend instead.

I wonder if creating a temporary (I mean per-backend) new catalog where
to store the bindings (or whatever you name them) and then allow another
syntax like the following would help here:

WITH BINDINGS bob ()
SELECT ...

The real problem though is that when using a transaction level pooling
system you want to tie your bindings to a transaction, not to a
session. So I'm not sure if storing the bindings in a local backend
catalog is a must-have feature.

Regards,
--
dim