I'm not missing the point. I was responding to a comment about performance. In my experience, COPY ... STDIN/STDOUT are just as fast the other COPY, given the

I'm not missing the point. I was responding to a comment about performance. In my experience, COPY ... STDIN/STDOUT are just as fast the other COPY, given the same filesystems. I think many people are unnecessarily conflating bulk COPY advantages with superuser rights here. We use it all the time via psql authenticated with unix domain socket. In most situations where there are users performing ETL and such, I think it is much safer to have them using a non-superuser role and manipulating files in their own user or group space. You can have all the performance of a bulk COPY without the risk of mangling the service-related files under the postgres user. I think it is better to give regular SSH accounts to these users than to give them elevated DB privileges so they can use server-side file or program COPY. Also, with psql you can do \copy ... program within your SQL script. It has all the expressive power of a server-side copy but actually runs commands under the invoking user instead of the postgres service.