Re: pg_dump roles support

Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
>> Discussing psql options made me recall an annoying problem that we've
>> run into.  There's no way (unless it was added to 8.3 and I missed it,
>> but I don't think so) to tell pg_dump 'switch to this role before
>> doing anything else'.  That's very frustrating when you use no-inherit
>> roles for admins.  eg:

> I've looked into using PGOPTIONS to set the role, and it doesn't seem to
> be possible because when we're processing the backend command-line
> options we're not yet in a transaction state, so variable.c:assign_role
> will always come back with NULL and you get:

> vardamir:/home/sfrost> PGOPTIONS="-c role=postgres" psql -d networx -h vardamir
> psql: FATAL:  invalid value for parameter "role": "postgres"

FWIW, I found by experimentation that ALTER USER ... SET ROLE does work
to cause a SET ROLE at login, though that might be a bit useless for
your purposes --- you'd more or less need a dedicated userid for
pg_dump.
        regards, tom lane