Hi all, The six different kinds of contexts in the pg_settings system view aren't terribly well documented. The current doc page says only: "Context required to set the parameter's value". A search through the archives turned up only a brief explanation[1] of what "postmaster" means for this setting. The recent book "PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance"[2] complains "The context field isn't documented very well in the official manual."
I've put together a patch to help document these values based on the comments in guc.h, the explanations in [2], and my own understanding. My crude explanations could probably use some further wordsmithing and check for accuracy :-) I avoided just copy-pasting from guc.h, particulary because some of the explanations struck me as confusing or incorrect. For instance: * not all USERSET options may be set "any time", such as transaction_isolation if you're already in the middle of a transaction. * I found the explanation for BACKEND confusing; it wasn't clear to me from the comment that a pg_ctl reload would change such settings for future backends. I could attempt a patch for the comments in guc.h too, if there's interest. Cheers Josh -- [1] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-admin/2006-05/msg00067.php [2] p. 126, section "Allowed change context"
pg_settings_contexts.patch
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