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.
