Re: why can't a table be part of the same publication as its schema

On Mon, Sep 19, 2022 at 11:03 PM Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org> wrote:
> For #1 (allowing calls that have schema/table overlap...), there appears
> to be both a patch that allows this (reversing[8]), and a suggestion for
> dealing with a corner-case that is reasonable, i.e. disallowing adding
> schemas to a publication when specifying column-lists. Do we think we
> can have consensus on this prior to the RC1 freeze?

I am not sure whether we can or should rush a fix in that fast, but I
agree with this direction.

> For #2 ("ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA" syntax), this was heavily discussed on
> the original thread[1][3][4][5][7]. I thought Tom's proposal on the
> syntax[3] was reasonable as it "future proofs" for when we allow other
> schema-scoped objects to be published and give control over which ones
> can be published.

All right, well, I still don't like it and think it's confusing, but
perhaps I'm in the minority.

> I don't think we should change this behavior that's already in logical
> replication. While I understand the reasons why "GRANT ... ALL TABLES IN
> SCHEMA" has a different behavior (i.e. it's not applied to future
> objects) and do not advocate to change it, I have personally been
> affected where I thought a permission would be applied to all future
> objects, only to discover otherwise. I believe it's more intuitive to
> think that "ALL" applies to "everything, always."

Nah, there's room for multiple behaviors here. It's reasonable to want
to add all the tables currently in the schema to a publication (or
grant permissions on them) and it's reasonable to want to include all
current and future tables in the schema in a publication (or grant
permissions on them) too. The reason I don't like the ALL TABLES IN
SCHEMA syntax is that it sounds like the former, but actually is the
latter. Based on your link to the email from Tom, I understand now the
reason why it's like that, but it's still counterintuitive to me.

> For #3 (more superuser-only), in general I do agree that we shouldn't be
> adding more of these. However, we have in this release, and not just to
> this feature. ALTER SUBSCRIPTION ... SKIP[11] requires superuser. I
> think it's easier for us to "relax" privileges (e.g. w/predefined roles)
> than to make something "superuser-only" in the future, so I don't see
> this being a blocker for v15. The feature will continue to work for
> users even if we remove "superuser-only" in the future.

Yeah, this is clearly not a release blocker, I think.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com