Rules for 6.4 finished

Bruce,

I'll send the patch itself directly to you. It's a bigger one
and I don't want to waste bandwidth on the list. Would you
please apply that one and forget the two others I posted
recently? The first rules patch (that is already applied) is
O.K.

This is the final state of the rule system for 6.4 after the
patch is applied:

Rewrite rules on relation level work fine now.

Event qualifications on insert/update/delete rules work
fine now.

I added the new keyword OLD to reference the CURRENT
tuple. CURRENT will be removed in 6.5.

Update rules can reference NEW and OLD in the rule
qualification and the actions.

Insert/update/delete rules on views can be established to
let them behave like real tables.

For insert/update/delete rules multiple actions are
supported now. The actions can also be surrounded by
parantheses to make psql happy. Multiple actions are
required if update to a view requires updates to multiple
tables.

Regular users are permitted to create/drop rules on
tables they have RULE permissions for
(DefineQueryRewrite() is now able to get around the
access restrictions on pg_rewrite). This enables view
creation for regular users too. This required an extra
boolean parameter to pg_parse_and_plan() that tells to
set skipAcl on all rangetable entries of the resulting
queries. There is a new function
pg_exec_query_acl_override() that could be used by
backend utilities to use this facility.

All rule actions (not only views) inherit the permissions
of the event relations owner. Sample: User A creates
tables T1 and T2, creates rules that log
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE on T1 in T2 (like in the regression
tests for rules I created) and grants ALL but RULE on T1
to user B. User B can now fully access T1 and the
logging happens in T2. But user B cannot access T2 at
all, only the rule actions can. And due to missing RULE
permissions on T1, user B cannot disable logging.

Rules on the attribute level are disabled (they don't
work properly and since regular users are now permitted
to create rules I decided to disable them).

Rules on select must have exactly one action that is a
select (so select rules must be a view definition).

UPDATE NEW/OLD rules are disabled (still broken, but
triggers can do it).

There are two new system views (pg_rule and pg_view) that
show the definition of the rules or views so the db admin
can see what the users do. They use two new functions
pg_get_ruledef() and pg_get_viewdef() that are builtins.

The functions pg_get_ruledef() and pg_get_viewdef() could
be used to implement rule and view support in pg_dump.

PostgreSQL is now the only database system I know, that
has rewrite rules on the query level. All others (where I
found a rule statement at all) use stored database
procedures or the like (triggers as we call them) for
active rules (as some call them).

Future of the rule system:

The now disabled parts of the rule system (attribute
level, multiple actions on select and update new stuff)
require a complete new rewrite handler from scratch. The
old one is too badly wired up.

After 6.4 I'll start to work on a new rewrite handler,
that fully supports the attribute level rules, multiple
actions on select and update new. This will be available
for 6.5 so we get full rewrite rule capabilities.

Jan

--

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