Re: Trusted versus untrusted Pl language

On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 4:49 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 07:38:16PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Steven Pousty <steve(dot)pousty(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > > 3. An example of how to make a pre-installed untrusted langue into a
> > > trusted language
> >
> > Under what circumstances would that be a good idea?
> >
> > I can't imagine that we'd really want to recommend end users doing
> > that, but an example would surely be taken as a recommendation
> > that it's okay to do it.
>
> Right. The language has to provide some sandbox environment for us to
> consider it safe, e.g. Perl, but not Python. PL/pgSQL is safe since it
> doesn't have any interface to external resources.
>
> ---------------------------
If you consider the application developer or data scientist's perspective
it makes total sense. I don't like the pattern of appdevs always working as
the postgres user, it encourages bad patterns and can often blow up when
you move the application to production.
Instead I think a good flow for an appdev or a data scientists to follow
when developing their function in Pl/Python or PL/R is:
1) Make the langauge trusted on the appdevs or data scientist's instance of
Postgres. Most developers either work on a cluster on their laptop or in a
container.
2) Send the finished product to the DBA and security teams for review.
3) If it passes review and testing then you can put it into production.

The SQL I am talking about is this:
UPDATE pg_language SET lanpltrusted = true WHERE lanname LIKE 'plr';

There should also be a reminder to NOT do this in production.

Thanks
Steve