Book Image

PostgreSQL 10 Administration Cookbook - Fourth Edition

Book Image

PostgreSQL 10 Administration Cookbook - Fourth Edition

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source database management system with an enviable reputation for high performance and stability. With many new features in its arsenal, PostgreSQL 10 allows users to scale up their PostgreSQL infrastructure. This book takes a step-by-step, recipe-based approach to effective PostgreSQL administration. Throughout this book, you will be introduced to these new features such as logical replication, native table partitioning, additional query parallelism, and much more. You will learn how to tackle a variety of problems that are basically the pain points for any database administrator - from creating tables to managing views, from improving performance to securing your database. More importantly, the book pays special attention to topics such as monitoring roles, backup, and recovery of your PostgreSQL 10 database, ensuring high availability, concurrency, and replication. By the end of this book, you will know everything you need to know to be the go-to PostgreSQL expert in your organization.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Always knowing which user is logged in

In the preceding recipes, we just logged the value of the user variable in the current PostgreSQL session to log the current user role.

This does not always mean that this particular user was the user that was actually authenticated at the start of the session. For example, a superuser can execute the SET ROLE TO ... command to set its current role to any other user or role in the system. As you might expect, non-superusers can assume only those roles that they own.

It is possible to differentiate between the logged-in role and the assumed role using the current_user and session_user session variables:

postgres=# select current_user, session_user;
current_user | session_user
-------------+--------------
postgres | postgres

postgres=# set role to bob;
SET
postgres=> select current_user, session_user;
current_user | session_user
-------...