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From: Richard Troy <rtroy@ScienceTools.com>
To: AgentM <agentm@themactionfaction.com>
Cc: pgsql general <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Is there anyway to...
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 12:00:48 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0611021157280.1126-100000@denzel.in> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <26B58EAC-4BCC-470E-AC5E-477A5AA4CA52@themactionfaction.com>



On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, AgentM wrote:
> >
> > Just some commentary...  This is exactly the sort of thing cron is
> > for.  Duplicating that functionality in the RDBMS would be silly
> > IMO.  I don't see why you could consider cron to be "dirty" for
> > this application...
>
> I actually tried to come up with something for this. There are plenty
> of good reasons to have some timer functionality in the database:
>
> 1) it makes regular database-oriented tasks OS portable
> 2) your cron user needs specific permissions + authorization to
> access the database whereas postgres could handle "sudo"-like
> behavior transparently
> 3) there are triggers other than time that could be handy- on vacuum,
> on db start, on db quit, on NOTIFY
>
> Unfortunately, the limitation I came across was for 2). There is no
> way to use "set session authorization" or "set role" safely because
> the wrapped code could always exit from the sandbox. So my timer only
> works for db superusers.
>
> -M

...This type of need is exactly what custom written daemons are for.
They're surely database and OS portable (or can be, at least), there's no
need for any super-user capability of any kind, you can use any kind of
trigger you like, and there's no permission leakage problem, either... I
guess all you need is functioning nohup capability (which Windows systems
may have trouble with, I don't know).

Richard

-- 
Richard Troy, Chief Scientist
Science Tools Corporation
510-924-1363 or 202-747-1263
rtroy@ScienceTools.com, http://ScienceTools.com/




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