Joshua Brindle wrote:
> Nonetheless, this conversation seems moot now that Tom has walled off
> and won't even discuss row-level access controls.
I think that's a bit of an overstatement.
He says he's against them[1] and he says that they are the sticking
point on this patch[2], and that they break SQL[2] and that he believes
that implementations of row level acls he can imagine would be buggy[2].
Elsewhere other people on the core team are suggesting that
others want to see SQL-level row permissions[3].
My reading of the discussion is that row-level access controls aren't
vetoed permanently, but rather that (a) it's still clear what SQL
semantics they'll break, (b) the implementations discussed so far
seem at high risk of bugs to some people, and (c) some people haven't
been sold on the need for them. None of those necessarily state
that the feature will never get into postgres; but it makes it sound
like a really high bar to jump over for a release that was originally
scheduled to be done a while ago.
[1] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2009-01/msg02389.php
[2] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2009-01/msg02339.php
[3] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2009-01/msg02391.php