Re: RLS related docs

On 28 August 2016 at 21:23, Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com> wrote:
> Apologies for the delay, but new patch attached. Assuming no more
> comments, will commit this, backpatched to 9.5, in a day or two.
>

Looking at this again, I think there is something fishy about these
dump/restore flags.

If you do pg_dump --enable-row-security, then row_security is turned
on during the dump and only the user-visible portions of the tables
are dumped. But why does such a dump emit "SET row_security = on;" as
part of the dump? There doesn't appear to be any reason for having
row_security turned on during the restore just because it was on
during the dump. The INSERT policies may well be different from the
SELECT policies, and so this may lead to a dump that cannot be
restored. ISTM that row_security should be off inside the dump, and
only enabled during restore if the user explicitly asks for it,
regardless of what setting was used to produce the dump.

Also, isn't it the case that --enable-row-security during pg_restore
is only relevant when performing a data-only restore (like
--disable-triggers). Otherwise, it looks to me as though the restore
will create the tables, restore the data, and then only at the end
restore the table policies and enable row level security on the
tables. So it looks like the flag would have no effect (and a
COPY-format dump would work fine) for a non-data-only dump.

I never really looked at the RLS dump/restore code. Am I missing something?

Regards,
Dean