Re: GRANT ON ALL IN schema

> Well, since I've written the patch I am for it :) Probably with that
> GRANT ON * and GRANT ON schema.* as it has indeed very low probability
> that something like that will be in standard with different meaning and
> also it's mysql compatible (which is the only db currently having this
> feature I think), even if that's very little plus.

I disagree here. While it's nice to be MySQL-compatible, a glob "*" is
not at all consistent with other SQL syntax, whereas "ALL" and "GRANT ON
ALL IN SCHEMA <schema>" are.

The answer as far as the standard is concerned is, why not make an
effort to get this into the standard?

>> And how do we want to filter default acls ?
> My opinion is that the best way to do this would be ALTER DEFAULT
> PRIVILEGES GRANT ..., without any additional filters, it would just
> affect the role which runs this command. I think this is best solution
> because ALTER SCHEMA forces creation of many schemas that might not have
> anything to do with structure of the database (if you want different
> default privileges for different things). Also having default privileges
> per role with filters on various things will IMHO create more confusion
> than good. And finally if somebody wants to have different default
> privileges for different things than he can just create child roles with
> different default privileges and use SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION to switch
> between them.

I'm not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing with you here, but I'll say
that it doesn't help a user have a consistent setup for assigning
privileges. GRANT ON ALL working per *schema* while ALTER DEFAULT
working per *role* will just create confusion and not improve the
managability of privileges in PostgreSQL. We need a DEFAULT and a GRANT
ALL statement which can be executed on the same scope so that users can
easily set up a coherent access control scheme.

For my part, I *do* use schema to control my security context for
database objects; I find that it's a convenience to be able to take
objects which a role has no permissions on out of its visibility
(through search_path) as well. And schema-based security mentally maps
to directory-based permissions, which unix sysadmins instinctively
understand. So I think that a form of GRANT ALL/DEFAULT which supported
schema-scoping would be useful to a *lot* more people than one which didn't.

I do understand that other scopes (such as scoping by object owner) are
equally valid and maybe more consistent with the SQL permissions model.
However, I think that role-scoping is not as intuitively understandible
to most users and would be, for that reason, less used and less useful.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com