apache / apache/datafusion

[DISCUSSION] Should we implement access control hooks in DataFusion?

Open
#7,501 6 comments 4 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

### Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge?

@comphead brings up an excellent point here: https://github.com/apache/arrow-datafusion/pull/7441#issuecomment-1698341294

Basically many database systems allow some sort of access control such as allowing some users the ability to read data but restricting writing.

There are many different granularities of such controls (like restricted to schemas, tables, read schema vs read data, etc) that a system might want to implement.

### Describe the solution you'd like

If anyone needs this today, they can build it on top of `LogicalPlan` (by checking `LogicalPlan` contents and implementing whatever controls they want).

It might be interesting to add some sort of built in (extensible) mechanism into DataFusion to make this process easier.

### Describe alternatives you've considered

I think we should wait for someone with a real usecase / implementation on top of `LogicalPlan` that we can upstream once we work out the details rather than designing this in advance but I wanted to file the ticket to track the idea

### Additional context

_No response_

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reading the linked PR #7441 comment and the LogicalPlan implementation to understand the proposed access-control use case. Done would require a concrete, agreed scope and an extensible mechanism, but this discussion currently defers design until a real implementation or use case is available.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust, sql
Domain
databases, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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