On 31 July 2014 22:34, Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> wrote: > * Tom Lane (t...@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote: >> Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> writes: >> > * Bruce Momjian (br...@momjian.us) wrote: >> >> Actually, thinking more, Stephen Frost mentioned that the auditing >> >> system has to modify database _state_, and dumping/restoring the state >> >> of an extension might be tricky. >> >> > This is really true of any extension which wants to attach information >> > or track things associated with roles or other database objects. What >> > I'd like to avoid is having an extension which does so through an extra >> > table or through reloptions or one of the other approaches which exists >> > in contrib and which implements a capability we're looking at adding to >> > core >> >> We have core code that uses reloptions --- autovacuum for instance --- >> so I'm not exactly clear on why that's so unacceptable for this. > > There was a pretty good thread regarding reloptions and making it so > extensions could use them which seemed to end up with a proposal to turn > 'security labels' into a more generic metadata capability. Using that > kind of a mechanism would at least address one of my concerns about > using reloptions (specifically that they're specific to relations and > don't account for the other objects in the system). Unfortunately, the > flexibility desired for auditing is more than just "all actions of this > role" or "all actions on this table" but also "actions of this role on > this table", which doesn't fit as well.
Yes, there is a requirement, in some cases, for per role/relation metadata. Grant and ACLs are a good example. I spoke with Robert about a year ago that the patch he was most proud of was the reloptions abstraction. Whatever we do in the future, keeping metadata in a slightly more abstract form is very useful. I hope we can get pgAudit in as a module for 9.5. I also hope that it will stimulate the requirements/funding of further work in this area, rather than squash it. My feeling is we have more examples of feature sets that grow over time (replication, view handling, hstore/JSONB etc) than we have examples of things languishing in need of attention (partitioning). -- Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
