Re: Switching roles as an replacement of connection pooling tools

"David G. Johnston" <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Would a scheme whereby you basically only get to SET ROLE one time work?
> Basically the connection layer logs in and immediately SET SESSION
> AUTHORIZATION AND SET ROLE [WITH SETTINGS?] to another role. For all
> intents and purposes the session now looks as if that role was the one that
> performed the login. However, that role is forbidden from changing its
> identity. This removes attack vectors but also means that applications
> cannot made use of finer grained grants without the main role inheriting
> all of them. I can see this being an acceptable trade-off in some/many
> uses.

> When the session is returned to a pool it can either be kept around waiting
> for another request by the same user or it would have to be closed and
> reestablished should the connection need to be freed up for another user.

Doesn't seem like this'd actually provide any useful functionality for a
connection pooler. It still has to restrict any one underlying connection
to be used by only one role. You've added more bookkeeping (because
there's a state where a connection's role is unassigned) but no
flexibility.

regards, tom lane