Re: requests / suggestions to help with backups

Lou Duchez wrote:
> Like everyone else, I use pg_dump for backup purposes; I have a cron job
> that runs a pg_dump whose output is then FTP'd elsewhere. Two things
> that would make my life easier:
>
> 1) "grant select on database ..." or, hypothetically, "grant select on
> cluster". The goal would be to create a read-only PostgreSQL user, one
> who can read the contents of an entire database (or even the entire
> cluster) but make no changes.  Currently, to do my cron job, I have to
> specify a "trusted" user, otherwise PostgreSQL will ask for a password;
> it sure would be nice if I could neuter my "trusted" user so he cannot
> do any damage. (Yes, I could set read-only privileges on a table-by-table
> basis. Obviously, that's a pain.)
>
> 2) "pg_dumpall -E". If I could specify a single encoding for all my
> database dumps, I could use pg_dumpall. But I cannot.  (My databases
> themselves are encoded as UTF-8, but the data in them is all LATIN1, and
> I'd like to dump it all as LATIN1.)  There are quite possibly good
> reasons for not offering the "-E" option on pg_dumpall; in the wrong
> hands it could be nightmarish. But sensibly employed, it could be very useful.
>
> And, combining my two requests, a "grant select on cluster ..." would
> allow me to do something like:
>
> pg_dumpall -U neutereduser -E LATIN1 -f onehugefile.bak
>
> I could really go for that. Especially when there's a major upgrade to
> PostgreSQL.
I guess you missed this:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/interactive/sql-grant.html
You want the third one down.

--
erik jones <erik@myemma.com>
software development
emma(r)