Re: Unsafe GUCs and ALTER SYSTEM WAS: Re: ALTER SYSTEM SET

* Josh Berkus (josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com) wrote:
> On 08/05/2013 11:14 AM, Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
> > * in a few years from now people will just use superuser over the
> > network for almost all stuff "because its easy and I can click around in
> > $gui", having potential "unsafe" operations available over the network
> > will in turn cause a lot of actual downtime (in a lot of cases the
> > reason why people want remote management is because the don't have
> > physical/shell access - so if they break stuff they cannot fix)
>
> See thread "Disabling ALTER SYSTEM SET".

I'm really not thrilled with this "solution".

> However, there are other places where ALTER SYSTEM SET will be valuable.
> For example, for anyone who wants to implement an autotuning utility.
> For example, I'm writing a network utility which checks bgwriter stats
> and tries adjusting settings over the network to improve checkpoint
> issues. Not having to SSH configuration files into place (and make sure
> they're not overridden by other configuration files) would make writing
> that script a *lot* easier. Same thing with automated performance testing.

I've done a fair bit of this myself and find templating postgresql.conf
isn't really all that hard and comes in handy for a lot things, not to
mention that it can then be integrated into a configuration management
system more easily.. Still, I'm fine w/ parameters which don't depend
on external things happening, which I think covers a lot of this
use-case.

Thanks,

Stephen