> > I'm sorry for *custom users*.
> > The project it's kind of cpanel.
> > A user can create and grant access for his databases.
> > And thx to pg_dump he can export & import databases.
> > So any user that have a db might want to export his data through his web
> > interface.
>
> Hmm. Well, you could use a super-user account to do the dump. It
> would have access to everything, and would only need one password.
> I'm wondering about security implications of that, however.
There is a significant difference between 'backups', which are more of
a DBA-level task and thus likely to be under the control of someone
who in a UNIX context has root access or at least DBA shell access, plus
the ability to schedule cron jobs, and 'exports' or 'imports', which
are something that an individual user may wish to do with his/her own
data independent of any database-wide backup schedules.
The existing protocols (pg_dump, etc) are largely geared towards
DBA-level backups, thus they tend to depend upon backend database
access and validation schemes, ie, through .pgpass or pg_hba.conf,
as opposed to frontend tools and user-level privilege grants.
--
Mike Nolan