[Netarchivesuite-users] MySQL database , security and programmatic migration on startup - WHY?

[nicolas.giraud at bnf.fr]

Hi,

I am installing the NetArchive Suite  and setting my configuration. I am 
using MySQL for the database, and I have configured very strict access 
permissions, as my IT requires :

- root has full privileges and can only access from localhost
- the applications use a specific user with limited privileges (SELECT, 
INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE). That user is configured in settings.xml 
(parameter to the JDBC URL).

I have found something in NetArchiveSuite code that kind of bothers me. 
When initializing the GUIApplication class, the initialization of the site 
section triggers a check in MySQLSpecifics of some kind of  per-table 
version in the DB schema, and if needed, performs a programmatic migration 
(DBSpecifics line 212). This migration involves performing ALTER updates 
on the  database, which I don't intend, for security reasons, to allow to 
the application. So right now I'm getting an SQL exception because my 
configured user is limited to SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. How 
comes such structural updates are done in Java? This seems to me a design 
fault, all schema modifications should be performed by SQL scripts 
executed as root on the local machine that hosts the database (or a 
separate Java program) , and not by the application itself. Also I believe 
that the version number should be at the schema scope, the table scope 
seems too thin to me, there is risk to leave the DB schema in an 
incoherent state.

So right now I have no other choice than compromising my security to cope 
with this. Sure it's not that big a deal for a developper installation, 
but the DB administrators will 100% sure cringe about this, and they'll be 
right. I think this should be discussed for later releases of NetArchive 
Suite, programmatically handling backwards compatibility during 
application initialization is, in my humble opinion and based on my 
experience, a serious design flaw.

Best,
Nicolas



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