Re: REPLICATION privilege and shutdown

On 20.01.2011 11:41, Fujii Masao wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Both the user with REPLICATION privilege and the superuser can
> call pg_stop_backup. But only superuser can connect to the server
> to cancel online backup during shutdown. The non-superuser with
> REPLICATION privilege cannot. Is this behavior intentional? Or just
> oversight?

I think we need to consider the situation after the "multiple streaming
base backups" patch goes in. After that we can change pg_stop_backup()
so that you need superuser privileges to run it again - replication
privileges is enough to do a streaming base backup, but that no longer
interferes with the pg_start/stop_backup() admin functions.

At the moment, a streaming base backup and manual pg_start/stop_backup()
use the same machinery, so it's possible e.g to run pg_stop_backup()
while a streaming base backup is running, causing it to fail at the end.
Or worse, you can run pg_stop_backup()+pg_start_backup(), and the
streaming base backup will seemingly succeed, but the produced backup is
potentially corrupt.

The multiple base backups patch will fix that too.

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com