> but I still think that neither should overload > what FATAL error means
I see, I misunderstood what you meant by graceful there. In this case, this is also a good comment for the password expiration thread, currently that also uses FATAL errors for terminating a connection when the password expires. What other option do you see? Something new for this use case like GoAway, and clients not understanding it simply get disconnected after some grace period? Or using the recently merged connectionWarning to send a warning to the client, and disconnect it shortly if it doesn't do anything to fix the situation? When I tested the password expiration patch I noticed that deleted users who still have remaining active connections currently get ERRORs for every statement that requires permission checks, so in this regard using ERROR/FATAL for the situation seemed fine to me - it's similar to what already happens in some edge cases with authentication.
