Like everyone else, I use pg_dump for backup purposes; I have a cron job
that runs a pg_dump whose output is then FTP'd elsewhere. Two things
that would make my life easier:
1) "grant select on database ..." or, hypothetically, "grant select on
cluster". The goal would be to create a read-only PostgreSQL user, one
who can read the contents of an entire database (or even the entire
cluster) but make no changes. Currently, to do my cron job, I have to
specify a "trusted" user, otherwise PostgreSQL will ask for a password;
it sure would be nice if I could neuter my "trusted" user so he cannot
do any damage. (Yes, I could set read-only privileges on a table-by-table
basis. Obviously, that's a pain.)
2) "pg_dumpall -E". If I could specify a single encoding for all my
database dumps, I could use pg_dumpall. But I cannot. (My databases
themselves are encoded as UTF-8, but the data in them is all LATIN1, and
I'd like to dump it all as LATIN1.) There are quite possibly good
reasons for not offering the "-E" option on pg_dumpall; in the wrong
hands it could be nightmarish. But sensibly employed, it could be very useful.
And, combining my two requests, a "grant select on cluster ..." would
allow me to do something like:
pg_dumpall -U neutereduser -E LATIN1 -f onehugefile.bak
I could really go for that. Especially when there's a major upgrade to
PostgreSQL.