On 08/05/2013 08:02 PM, Josh Berkus wrote: > On 08/05/2013 10:49 AM, Stephen Frost wrote: >> Josh, I really have to ask- are these people who are implementing puppet >> to control these configs really clamoring to have an 'ALTER SYSTEM' PG >> command to have to code against instead of dealing with text files? I >> feel like you're arguing for these parameters to be modifiable through >> ALTER SYSTEM on the grounds that these parameters need to be set at some >> point and in some way and not because having them set through ALTER >> SYSTEM actually makes any *sense*. > > Nope. ALTER SYSTEM, from my POV, is mainly for folks who *don't* use > Puppet/Chef/whatever. Here's where I see ALTER SYSTEM being useful: > > * invididually managed servers with out centralized management (i.e. one > DBA, one server). > * developer machines (i.e. laptops and vms) > * automated testing of tweaking performance parameters > * setting logging parameters temporarily on systems under centralized > management
overridding the configuration system, that will just lead to very confused sysadmins why something that was configurated now behaves differently and I cause operational hazards because people _WILL_ forget changing those "temporary only" settings back? > > For that reason, the only way in which I think it makes sense to try to > make ALTER SYSTEM set work together with Puppet/Chef is in the rather > limited context of modifying the logging settings for limited-time data > collection. Mostly, ALTER SYSTEM SET is for systems were people > *aren't* using Puppet/Chef. I tend to disagree, the current approach of ALTER SYSTEM requiring superuser basically means: * in a few years from now people will just use superuser over the network for almost all stuff "because its easy and I can click around in $gui", having potential "unsafe" operations available over the network will in turn cause a lot of actual downtime (in a lot of cases the reason why people want remote management is because the don't have physical/shell access - so if they break stuff they cannot fix) * for classic IaaS/SaaS/DBaaS the ALTER SYSTEM seems to be mostly useless in the current form - because most of them will not or cannot hand out flat out superuser (like if you run a managed service you might want customers to be able to tweak some stuff but say not archive/pitr/replication stuff because the responsibility for backups is with the hosting company) Stefan -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers