Re: Cross-backend signals and administration (Was: Re: pg_terminate_backend for same-role)

Excerpts from Robert Haas's message of mar mar 27 14:38:47 -0300 2012:
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Daniel Farina <daniel(at)heroku(dot)com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >> I think the more important question is a policy question: do we want
> >> it to work like this?  It seems like a policy question that ought to
> >> be left to the DBA, but we have no policy management framework for
> >> DBAs to configure what they do or do not wish to allow.  Still, if
> >> we've decided it's OK to allow cancelling, I don't see any real reason
> >> why this should be treated differently.
> >
> > Is there a hypothetical DBA that doesn't want a mere-mortal user to be
> > able to signal one of their own backends to do "cancel query, rollback
> > the transaction, then close the socket"?  If so, why?
>
> Well, I guess if you have different people sharing the same user-ID,
> you probably wouldn't want that.
>
> But maybe that's not an important case.

Isn't it the case that many web applications run under some common
database user regardless of the underlying webapp user? I wouldn't say
that's an unimportant case. Granted, the webapp user wouldn't have
permission to run arbitrary queries in the first place.

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Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
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