Re: 8.4 release planning

Ron Mayer <rm_pg@cheapcomplexdevices.com> writes:
> It seems to me that there are two different standards to which this feature
> might be held.

> Is the goal
>   a) SEPostgres can provide useful rules to add security to some
>      specific applications so long as you're careful to avoid crafting
>      policies that produce bizarre behaviors (like avoiding restricing
>      access to foreign key data you might need).   On the other hand it
>      gives you enough rope to hang yourself and produce weird results
>      that don't make sense from a SQL standard point of view if you
>      aren't careful matching the SEPostgres rules with your apps.

> or
>   b) SEPostgreSQL should only give enough rope that you can not
>      craft rules that produce unexpected behavior from a SQL point
>      of view; and that it would be bad if one can produce SEPostgres
>      policies that produce unexpected SQL behavior.

With my other hat on (the red one) what I'm concerned about is whether
this patch will ever produce a feature that I could turn on in the
standard Red Hat/Fedora build of Postgres.  Right at the moment it seems
that the potential performance hit, for users who are *not using*
SEPostgres but merely have to use a build in which it is present,
might be bad enough to guarantee that that will never happen.
        regards, tom lane