Re: Need feedback on new feature (\for)

Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:

> I've had some fun in the past where I've had to grant a lot of tables and
> other similar system commands. Unfortunatly, you can't use queries to fill
> in fields for you. Anyway, I've implemented a patch which allows the
> following:
>
> grant select on ":2" to ":1"
> \for select usename, relname from pg_catalog.pg_user, pg_catalog.pg_class where relname not like 'pg_%';

That's definitely a useful thing to do, but I'm not sure I like your
syntax. As someone else mentioned, the ":2" is confusing; it's like a
bind variable, but isn't. And real bind variables don't work, as you are
substituting identifiers, not literals.

You're not completely out in the cold doing something like this without
a patch. Right now, I believe you can do something like (in Oracle
PL/SQL-ish syntax; it's more familiar to me):

     declare
         grantcursor cursor as
         select    usename, relname
         from      pg_catalog.pg_user, pg_catalog.pg_class
         where     relname not like 'pg_%';
     begin
         for grantline in grantcursor loop
             execute immediate 'grant select on '
                 || quoteident(grantline.relname)
                 || ' to ' || quoteident(grantline.usename) || '"';
         end loop;
     end;

(I'm not sure how to do an anonymous plpgsql block. Anyone?)

This is more wordy, but should work.

Scott