Hi,
> To distinguish roles from users I propose to use "Host" field of
> mysql.user table - If this field is empty then we should consider the
> specified record to be a role.
I see all the discussion around this, but I would propose a different
tack: why not use a host which would otherwise be reserved? The
similarity in functionality and such between users and roles is obvious,
but you don't want to break or change existing functionality. How about
e.g. role "foo" would be equivalent to user "foo" @ "$role". Since $
(or @, #, &, ^, *, !, etc.) would never appear in a well-formed hostname
or IP address, they call all be used to mark a role as such. The
commands to deal with roles would then really just be aliases on
user@"$role" and thus very easy to implement.
Regards,
Jeremy
--
high performance mysql consulting
www.provenscaling.com
