Re: [HACKERS] pg_dump roles support

Greetings,

* Stephen Frost (sfrost@snowman.net) wrote:
> 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"

In current CVS the relevant lines in variable.c are around 868. That's
my best guess as to what's happening anyway, I havn't had a chance to
actually hook up a debugger and trace it.

As I discuss above, it'd be really nice have a --role or similar option
to ask pg_dump to set role to a particular user before dumping the
database.

Thanks!

Stephen