Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> writes:
> I once wrote a similar patch to the one Dave submitted here and feel like
> it's worth committing at least a documentation patch to show how to deal
> with this. It's not obvious that pgbench pays attention to the
> environment variables at all, and it's even less obvious that you can pass
> what look like server options in there.
It's not pgbench that is paying attention to this, it's libpq.
This is at least referred to in the libpq and server documentation,
eg the tenth paragraph here:
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/config-setting.html
It might be worth more emphasis, not sure. It doesn't come up all
that often.
> I just poked around the
> documentation a bit and I didn't find anything that cleared up which
> options you can pass from a client; in addition to -W, I can imagine
> pgbench users might also want to use -S (sort memory) or -f (forbid
> scan/join types). If I can get someone to clarify what is supported there
> I can put together a pgbench doc patch that addresses this topic.
Anything you'd be allowed to SET can be set from PGOPTIONS (-c or --var
syntax). As for the special-purpose postgres command-line switches,
I believe they are all equivalent to one or another GUC variable:
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/runtime-config-short.html
so the restrictions are the same as for the underlying variable.
regards, tom lane
