Re: feature proposal ...

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
Cc: Rod Taylor <pg@rbt.ca>, tshipley@deru.com, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2005-09-22T03:09:38Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> Rod Taylor wrote:
>> Writing a file on the server requires significant privilege, including
>> access to the server itself so you can retrieve the results.

> But we also do COPY to STDOUT which requires no special privileges on 
> the server.

Currently, we have a special privilege type about creating temporary
tables, which I think also restricts creating temporary views --- but
now that I think about it, it's not obvious why that should follow.
The only good argument I can see for restricting temp table creation
is that one might eat up large amounts of server disk space with a temp
table, and of course this argument doesn't apply to a temp view.  So we
could refute this argument by just not making the permission check for
CREATE TEMP VIEW.

> Incidentally, if we are going to allow copy out from views, it would be 
> nice and orthogonal to allow copy in too. Hasn't there been some talk 
> about making automatically writeable views?

Sure, but until we actually have automatically writable views, it's a
bit premature to worry about that.

			regards, tom lane