Re: permission inconsistency with functions

On fre, 2010-07-23 at 11:48 -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> "In particular, it must have read access to all tables that you want
> to
> back up, so in practice you almost always have to run it as a database
> superuser."
> 
> Ignoring the fact that databases have a lot more objects than tables,
> there is no READ/SELECT permission for functions. Thus in order to
> backup a function, I must have EXECUTE permissions on the function.
> Further if I don't have EXECUTE permissions I can still see the
> function in pg_proc.

In order to back up a table's contents you must read it, but you don't
need to execute a function in order to back it up.  It's not
inconsistent, it's just different.