permission inconsistency with functions

Hello,

I am writing a blog on backups with postgresql, which I plan at some
point (if someone doesn't beat me to it) on turning into a patch for the
docs but I found this inconsistency:

The docs state that:

"In particular, it must have read access to all tables that you want to
back up, so in practice you almost always have to run it as a database
superuser."

Ignoring the fact that databases have a lot more objects than tables,
there is no READ/SELECT permission for functions. Thus in order to
backup a function, I must have EXECUTE permissions on the function.
Further if I don't have EXECUTE permissions I can still see the function
in pg_proc.

This seems like an inconsistency worth looking into, especially now that
we have per column perms.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

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On fre, 2010-07-23 at 11:48 -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> "In particular, it must have read access to all tables that you want
> to
> back up, so in practice you almost always have to run it as a database
> superuser."
>
> Ignoring the fact that databases have a lot more objects than tables,
> there is no READ/SELECT permission for functions. Thus in order to
> backup a function, I must have EXECUTE permissions on the function.
> Further if I don't have EXECUTE permissions I can still see the
> function in pg_proc.

In order to back up a table's contents you must read it, but you don't
need to execute a function in order to back it up. It's not
inconsistent, it's just different.

On Fri, 2010-07-23 at 21:55 +0300, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On fre, 2010-07-23 at 11:48 -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> > "In particular, it must have read access to all tables that you want
> > to
> > back up, so in practice you almost always have to run it as a database
> > superuser."
> >
> > Ignoring the fact that databases have a lot more objects than tables,
> > there is no READ/SELECT permission for functions. Thus in order to
> > backup a function, I must have EXECUTE permissions on the function.
> > Further if I don't have EXECUTE permissions I can still see the
> > function in pg_proc.
>
> In order to back up a table's contents you must read it, but you don't
> need to execute a function in order to back it up. It's not
> inconsistent, it's just different.

Sorry you are correct, I made a mistake in my ERROR message reading.

JD
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