Re: Can I get some PostgreSQL developer feedback on these five general issues I have with PostgreSQL and its ecosystem?

On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 05:39:57PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> tutiluren(at)tutanota(dot)com writes:
> > 1. All non-ANSI characters are turned into "?"s for application_name.
>
> Yeah, that's hard to do much with unfortunately. We cannot assume that
> all databases in an installation share the same encoding, so for globally
> visible strings like application_name, the only safe solution is to
> restrict them to ASCII.
>
> On the other hand, the very same thing could be said of database names
> and role names, yet we have never worried much about whether those were
> encoding-safe when viewed from databases with different encodings, nor
> have there been many complaints about the theoretical unsafety. So maybe
> this is just overly anal-retentive and we should drop the restriction,
> or at least pass through data that doesn't appear to be invalidly
> encoded.

I think the issue is that role and database names are controlled by
privileged users, while application_name is not.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB https://enterprisedb.com

The usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness, Bruce Lee