Re: What object types should be in schemas?

Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> The current hierarchy of object types is like this:
> ...
> How does one decide whether something should be in a schema or not?

Roughly speaking, I think the intuition was "if there are not likely
to be a lot of objects of type X, maybe they don't need to be within
schemas".

Extensions might be raised as a counterexample, but in that case
I recall that there was a specific consideration: extensions can
contain (own) schemas, so it would be very confusing if they could
also be within schemas.

I'm not sure about whether that holds for foreign data wrappers and
foreign servers, but isn't that case mandated by the SQL spec?

Roles and tablespaces aren't within schemas because they aren't
within databases.

> Over in the column encryption thread, the patch proposes to add various
> key types as new object types. For simplicity, I just stuck them
> directly under database, but I don't know whether that is correct.

Is it reasonable for those to be per-database rather than cluster-wide?
I don't immediately see a reason to have encrypted columns in shared
catalogs, but there would never be any chance of supporting that if
the keys live in per-database catalogs. (OTOH, perhaps there are
security reasons to keep them per-database, so I'm not insisting
that this is the right way.)

If we did make them cluster-wide then of course they'd be outside
schemas too. If we don't, I'd lean slightly towards putting them
within schemas, because that seems to be the default choice if you're
not sure. There probably aren't a huge number of text search parsers
either, but they live within schemas.

regards, tom lane