Re: Switching roles as an replacement of connection pooling tools

"David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> writes:
> ​Would a scheme whereby you basically only get to SET ROLE one time work?
> Basically the connection layer logs in and immediately SET SESSION
> AUTHORIZATION AND SET ROLE [WITH SETTINGS?] to another role.  For all
> intents and purposes the session now looks as if that role was the one that
> performed the login.  However, that role is forbidden from changing its
> identity.  This removes attack vectors but also means that applications
> cannot made use of finer grained grants without the main role inheriting
> all of them.  I can see this being an acceptable trade-off in some/many
> uses.

> When the session is returned to a pool it can either be kept around waiting
> for another request by the same user or it would have to be closed and
> reestablished should the connection need to be freed up for another user.

Doesn't seem like this'd actually provide any useful functionality for a
connection pooler.  It still has to restrict any one underlying connection
to be used by only one role.  You've added more bookkeeping (because
there's a state where a connection's role is unassigned) but no
flexibility.

            regards, tom lane