On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 2:38 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Any developer who can't think of six ways to DOS the server without > changing those settings should be fired on the spot for incompetence.
No kidding. But the point is that if the developer down the hall maliciously destroys your database server, you can go through channels and get him reprimanded or fired. But if the developer down the hall is a new hire who doesn't know beans about PostgreSQL and tries setting work_mem to 10GB, well, oops, it was an accident. And then another developer gets hired three weeks later and does the same thing. And then three months later somebody does it again. After a while people no longer remember that in each case it was a developer to blame. What they remember is that the DBA let the server go down three times.
IOW, honest mistakes happen.
Would it be possible to make the SUSET/USERSET property of a GUC modifiable? So a DBA can do
ALTER USER novice SET CONTEXT OF work_mem TO 'superuser';
Or, maybe
ALTER USER novice SET MAX_VAL OF work_mem TO '1 MB';
and extend it to say
ALTER USER novice SET MIN_VAL OF statement_timeout TO '1'; -- So that the user cannot turn off the timeout
ALTER DATABASE super_reliable SET ENUM_VALS OF synchronous_commit TO 'on'; -- So that the user cannot change the synchronicity of transactions against this database.
Regards, --
Gurjeet Singh EnterpriseDB Corporation The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
