On Jun 23, 2025, at 10:14 AM, Robert Treat <rob@xzilla.net> wrote:
Sorry for the late response, been busy at work :D.
Glad to hear you are still interested, slightly disheartened by the
general lack of concern around operational safety in this thread. I
actually think what you have done covers a lot of the ground for
multiple implementations, so I'm optimistic we can get something for
19.
Just for my own learning and mental model - what would be a good way to understand the change that wasn’t operationally safe?
I was thinking about this some more over the weekend and it does seem
like you can't get away from doing something with DDL; even though it
is the wrong mental model... like when your AC is running but you
don't think it is cool enough, so you turn it down farther, as if it
would blow colder air... but that isn't how AC actually work... it
seems you can't eliminate the desire for this mental model entirely.
Which to be clear, I am not against, it's just a bad tool for the hard
cases, but not in every case. Anyway, if I were picking this up, I
would separate out the two ideas; as I laid out in my email to David,
the GUC solution can stand on it's own without the DDL implementation,
and I would do that first, and then add a simplified DDL
implementation after the fact. Of course it could be done the other
way around, but I think you're more likely to land on the correct GUC
implementation if it isn't mixed up with DDL, and the best way to
assure that is by not having the DDL for the initial patch. Just my
.02, but happy to help spec it out further.
I am happy to split this into two, however I think starting with GUC first may not achieve a lot of cases that David and I were talking about earlier in the thread, perhaps? Where, if you want quick feedback without needing to make application / session / connection level changes (i.e GUC) then you can quickly do it via the ALTER statement. Happy to redo the patch and just keep ALTER for v1 accordingly, if it still makes sense.
Would folks have any preference between the two approaches?
Thank you
Shayon
