Re: MySQL interview, no mention of PostgreSQL

Neil Conway wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 12:54, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > While one could write  a utility in Postgres to create/process the file, the
> > "live" version of pg_hba.conf *must* be outside the database.   If our ACL
> > was in the database, then how would we know who has the rights to read the
> > ACL?
>
> I don't see why this is a show-stopping problem. Can you elaborate?

We don't want to fire up a backend until we know this is a valid user.
You could easily bring a server to a standstill by just sending false
connection requests.  Sure, you can still do that by flooding the
machine, but a database lookup is significantly more expensive than
checking a connection packet.

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