Re: Proposal of SE-PostgreSQL patches (for CommitFest:Sep)

"Robert Haas" <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> That's the wrong question. The question here is: does it make sense to
>> have per-row permissions implemented on top of an abstraction layer
>> whose sole current implementation is SE-Linux?

> Er, Bruce was asking about per-column, not per-row.

> There's a patch listed on CommitFest:2008-09 to introduce per-column
> permissions, but it's apparently still WIP. How much does that
> overlap/conflict with these patches?

Yeah, Stephen Frost is working on that and still has a ways to go.
I think he might get it done in time for 8.4 (ie, in time for the
November commitfest) but it's far from certain.

Per-column permissions are part of the SQL standard, and so I think
we have to implement that without depending on any OS-specific
infrastructure. So on that end I agree with Bruce's position that
we should do the SQL version first and then think about extensions
for SELinux.

Per-row is not in the spec and so we can design that as we please.
But as I mentioned a moment ago, I don't see how it can possibly
play nice with foreign keys ...

regards, tom lane