Re: Groups and roles - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Peter Eisentraut
Subject Re: Groups and roles
Date
Msg-id Pine.LNX.4.44.0306101859160.2367-100000@peter.localdomain
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Groups and roles  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Groups and roles  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers
Tom Lane writes:

> 1. Do we want to someday allow groups to have groups as members?  (Seems
> reasonable to me.)

I agree.

> 2. Are there any other differences between groups and roles?  (I'm not
> sure about this one.)

One other difference I found is that roles can be enabled or disabled (as
session state).  According to the SQL standard, only one role can be
active at once, but I think this is useless.  According to the Oracle
documentation, it seems that in Oracle many roles can be active (namely
all of those granted to you), but they can be selectively enabled or
disabled.  This seems like a reasonable feature, but it's not terribly
important.

Another issue is that users and roles share a namespace.  We might have to
deal with that sometime, but it's not a problem as far as the information
schema is concerned.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut   peter_e@gmx.net



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