Re: Limiting the impact of schema additions/poor queries made by clients on production machines

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 9:04 AM, Joshua Berry <yoberi(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Our shop uses postgres for a dozen installations. The applications
> have some realtime performance requirements, and are just good enough
> to function properly. The problem is that the clients (owners of the
> production servers) are using the same server/database for
> customizations that are causing problems with the performance of our
> applications.
>
> Example of clients' customizations:
> * Large tables with text datatypes that get cast in the queries
> * No primary keys, indexes, FK constraints
> * Use of external scripts that use count(*) from table where id = x,
> in a loop from the script, to determine how to construct more queries
> later in the same script.

Can you use londiste or slony to make a replicant for them to run
these things on so they don't affect the main production server?

> The clients consider themselves experts and don't take
> suggestions/criticism well. If we just go ahead and try to port/change
> the scripts ourselves, the old code can come back, clobbering the
> changes that we made!

It's pretty obvious that they are not only NOT experts, but also
unprofessional as well. If they won't cooperate, then I'd suggest
making it clear you're not going to make fixing their mistakes a
priority, and then proceed to give them enough rope to hang themselves
with.

> My question is this: how can we limit the resources to
> queries/applications other that what we create and deploy? Are there
> any pragmatic options in scenarios like this? We prided ourselves in
> having an OSS solution, but it seems that it's become a liability.

Even a Big Commercial DBMS can only hold back the clown patrol for so
long. If they're good enough at being bad users they can cause
problems. Besides, these guys sound like they'd demand admin access
to any db you gave them. You customer is your primary liability, not
your toolset. you make it more idiot proof, they become better
idiots. It's an arms race against stupidity, and you can't really win
one of those.

I'd take away their access if you can. They're idiots.