Thread: Possibilities of Fine Grained Access Control?

I need a solution for the following: With all data stored in the same
schema, consumers may only retreive and update data that is relevant to
them. At the same time, users in our own company need to see all data.

Is a solution similar to Oracle's Virtual Private Database possible with
PostgreSQL, as this is precisely what we need?

thanks,
Uden

Documentation:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/10gdba/week14_10gdba.html
http://www.databasesecurity.com/oracle-vpd.htm

In response to Uden van Hout <udenvh@gmail.com>:

> I need a solution for the following: With all data stored in the same
> schema, consumers may only retreive and update data that is relevant to
> them. At the same time, users in our own company need to see all data.
>
> Is a solution similar to Oracle's Virtual Private Database possible with
> PostgreSQL, as this is precisely what we need?

Not familiar with Oracle's solution, but ...

Without knowing the details, it's difficult to be sure if PostgreSQL's
native security meets your needs.  You can assign read/write/create
permissions to databases, schemas, tables, and other objects:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/sql-grant.html

This falls short if you need permissions at the row or column level,
which PG doesn't support naively (unless this has been added in 8.3
and I simply haven't see the announcement).

For that, the best approach I know for you is Veil:
http://veil.projects.postgresql.org/curdocs/index.html

--
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com