Re: Should creating a new base type require superuser status?

Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>> Unless you're going to allow them to create new C functions, I'm not
>> clear on how much they're going to be able to change the semantics.

> Well there's plenty that can be done just using text or bytea as
> representations. citext, or uuid for example.

For the sort of look-ma-no-C programming that you seem to be
envisioning, I don't think that real base types are appropriate at all.
What might make sense is to handle it as a domain over some
suitably-generic base type. The thing we'd have to fix to make that
work is the way that the ambiguous-function resolution rules
discriminate against functions that're declared to take domains.
Which is hard, but it seems a lot less likely to lead to weird
security risks than letting untrusted users mess with the details
of base-type operations.

Elein was going to go off in a corner and think about how to make that
work better, but I dunno if she's gotten anywhere yet.

regards, tom lane