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AUDIT.CATALOG.UNREAD — the catalog could not be read, so nothing was judged

  • Category: safety
  • Level: 0
  • Stability: stable
  • Suites: audit

The audit suite reads a live database's catalog and judges what it finds. When that read does not happen — no privilege, an unreachable server, a budget exhausted mid-read — there is nothing to judge, and an empty finding list is what a perfectly healthy database also produces.

This notice is the difference between those two reports.

The reason travels​

The finding carries a named reason rather than a generic failure, because the remedies are unrelated:

  • missing_privilege — the role cannot read the catalog views it needs. Grant, or accept a narrower audit.
  • managed_database_restriction — a hosted database withholds something no grant can restore. This is the one that is not fixable, and saying so is more useful than suggesting a grant that will not work.
  • catalog_read_budget_exceeded — the read hit its time budget. Raise sqlens.catalog.budget_ms, or narrow the schema scope.
  • server_unreachable — nothing answered.

Partial reads are reported as partial​

A catalog read that got some of the way through is not thrown away. What was read is judged; what was not is reported as a skip with its own reason, per area. So an audit against a restricted managed database still produces real findings about the tables it could see, and states plainly which parts of the picture are missing.

That is the whole design: degrade in a way the reader can see, never in a way that looks like success.

One member is a decision, not a gap​

AUDIT.CATALOG.UNREAD.EXCLUDED_BY_CONFIG names objects the reading left out on purpose. By default those are the objects an extension installs, citext, pg_trgm, postgis and the rest, which nobody in the project wrote. They were not read, so they stay in this family, but nothing about them is owed. The notice therefore reports as not_applicable, not as undetermined, a strict run such as the ci profile does not escalate it, and the report header does not count it as a part of the reading that is missing.

What SQLens needs to read​

Read access to the catalog views, and nothing else. The reader session is sealed read-only and proves the seal before it reads anything — it writes nothing, takes no lock, and creates nothing. If an audit ever appears to need a write privilege, that is a bug rather than a requirement.