pgsql: Mark search_path as GUC_REPORT

Mark search_path as GUC_REPORT

Report search_path changes to the client. Multi-tenant applications
often map tenants to schemas, and use search_path to pick the tenant a
given connection works with. This breaks when a connection pool (like
PgBouncer), because the search_path may change unexpectedly.

There are other GUCs we might want reported (e.g. various timeouts), but
search_path is by far the biggest foot gun that can lead either to
puzzling failures during query execution (when objects are missing or
are defined differently), or even to accessing incorrect data.

Many existing tools modify search_path, pg_dump being a notable example.

Ideally, clients could specify which GUCs are interesting and should be
subject to this reporting, but we don't support that. GUC_REPORT is what
connection pools rely on for other interesting GUCs, so just use that.

When this change was initially proposed in 2014, one of the concerns was
impact on performance. But this was addressed by commit 2432b1a04087,
which ensures we report each GUC at most once per query, no matter how
many times it changed during execution.

Eventually, this might be replaced / superseded by allowing doing this
by making the protocol extensible in this direction, but it's unclear
when (or if) that happens. Until then, we can leverage GUC_REPORT.

Author: Alexander Kukushkin, Jelte Fennema-Nio
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFh8B=k8s7WrcqhafmYhdN1+E5LVzZi_QaYDq8bKvrGJTAhY2Q@mail.gmail.com

Branch
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master

Details
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https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/28a1121fd91235e09793c9ce64cb5539719afa30

Modified Files
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src/backend/utils/misc/guc_tables.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)