Re: Possibility to disable `ALTER SYSTEM`

Going to agree with Robert Treat here about an extension being a great
solution. I resisted posting earlier as I wanted to see how this all pans
out, but I wrote a quick little POC extension some months ago that does
the disabling and works well (and cannot be easily worked around).

On Mon, Mar 18, 2024 at 4:59 PM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> I think that all of this is true except for (c). I think we'd need a
> new hook to make it work.
>

Seems we can just use ProcessUtility and:
if (IsA(parsetree, AlterSystemStmt) { ereport(ERROR, ...

When we know that a feature is
> widely-needed, it's better to have one good implementation of it in
> core than several perhaps not-so-good implementations out of core.
>

Meh, maybe. This one seems pretty dirt simple. Granted, I have expanded my
original POC to allow *some* things to be changed by ALTER SYSTEM, but the
original use case warrants a very small extension.

That allows us to focus all of our efforts on that one implementation
> instead of splitting them across several -- which is the whole selling
> point of open source, really -- and it makes it easier for users who
> want the feature to get access to it.
>

Well, yeah, but they have to wait until version 18 at best, while an
extension can run on any current version and probably be pretty
future-proof as well.

Cheers,
Greg