Re: Additional role attributes && superuser review

* Bruce Momjian (bruce(at)momjian(dot)us) wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 09:23:14PM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > > > Group ownership and permissions aren't a backup-method-specific
> > > > requirement either, in my view. I'm happy to chat with Marco (who has
> > > > said he would be weighing in on this thread when he is able to)
> > > > regarding barman, and whomever would be appropriate for BART (perhaps
> > > > you could let me know..?), but if it's possible to do a backup without
> > > > being a superuser and with only read access to the data directory, I
> > > > would expect every backup soltuion to view that as a feature which they
> > > > want to support, as there are environments which will find it desirable,
> > > > at a minimum, and even some which will require it.
> > >
> > > pg_dump doesn't need to read the PGDATA directory, and I thought this
> > > permission was to be used by pg_dump users as well.
> >
> > No. That has been a source of confusion, though I'm not quite sure how
> > or why, beyond the general assumption that anything 'backup' must
> > include 'pg_dump' (I don't generally consider that to be the case,
> > myself, but it seems others do...).
>
> I think the source of that is that many people have asked for
> backup-only uses, and I thought running pg_dump or pg_dumpall was one of
> those cases.

I'd want that to be a seperate permission which would really be
something along the lines of "allowed to read everything through a DB
connection", which is what pg_dump/pg_dumpall need.

Thanks!

Stephen