Re: Good News Everyone! + feature proposal

Laurenz Albe <laurenz(dot)albe(at)cybertec(dot)at> writes:
> On Thu, 2023-10-05 at 02:22 +0000, Jon Erdman wrote:
>> For the proposal (this one is a bit Apple specific): because my team
>> offers managed postgres to our Apple-internal customers, many of whom
>> are not database experts, or at least not postgres experts, we'd like to
>> be able to toggle the availability of UNLOGGED tables in
>> postgresql.conf, so our less clueful users have fewer footguns.

I'm doubtful that this is a problem that needs a solution.
If anything, the right answer is to fix whatever part of the
documentation isn't warning of the hazards strongly enough.

Even more to the point: if we accept this, how many other
footgun-preventing GUCs will have the same or stronger claim to
existence?

> It certainly sounds harmless, but there are two things that make me
> unhappy about this:

> - Yet another GUC. It's not like we don't have enough of them.
> (This is a small quibble.)

> - This setting would influence the way SQL is processed.
> We have had bad experiences with those; an often-quoted example is
> the "autocommit" parameter that got removed in 7.4.
> This certainly is less harmfuls, but still another pitfall that
> can confuse users.

Same objections here. Also note that the semantics we've defined
for GUCs (when they can be set and where) don't always line up
nicely with requirements of this sort. It's far from clear to me
whether such a GUC should be SUSET (making it a hard prohibition
for ordinary users) or USERSET (making it just a training wheel).

regards, tom lane