On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 10:54 AM Tom Lane <[email protected]> wrote: > Bharath Rupireddy <[email protected]> writes: > > I propose to add a simple new hook in set_config_option (void > > set_config_option_hook(struct config_generic *record);) and the > > vendors can implement their own platform-dependent extensions to > > accept or reject certain parameters (based on platform/VM > > configuration) that are of interest to them. > > This seems entirely useless. Vendors are unlikely to have any better > idea than we do about what are "reasonable" values. Moreover, if they > did, modifying the source code directly would be an easier route to > introducing their code than making use of a hook (which'd require > finding a way to ensure that some extension is loaded).
I don't think we should be in the business of encouraging vendors to fork the source code, and I think it is quite likely that a vendor will have better ideas than we do about what values they want to allow their users to set. It's far easier to know what is reasonable in a particular context than it is to make a statement about reasonableness in general. I have some desire here to see us solve this problem not just for service providers, but for users in general. You don't have to be a service provider to want to disallow SET work_mem = '1TB' -- you just need to be a DBA on a system where such a setting will cause bad things to happen. But, if you are a DBA on some random system, you won't likely find a hook to be a particularly useful way of controlling this sort of thing. I feel like Alice wants to do something like GRANT work_mem BETWEEN '1MB' AND '2GB' to bob, not that I'm proposing that particular syntax. I also don't have a clear idea for what to do about GUCs where a range constraint isn't useful. One could allow a list of permissible values, but that might not be powerful enough. One could maybe allow a PL validation function for a value, but that might be complicated to make work. In the end, I don't think providing a hook here is particularly unreasonable. I would be a little sad if it ended up being the only thing we provided, but I'm also not a huge believer in the idea of forcing people to write the patch that I want written as a condition of writing the patch that they want written. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
