survey: psql syntax errors abort my transactions - Mailing list pgsql-general

Maybe it's just me, but I'm wondering if it's worth changing the default behavior of psql so it doesn't abort transactions in interactive mode when I mistakenly mis-spell "select" or something silly like that.  This is of course easily remedied in my psqlrc file by adding "\set ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK interactive". I don't know whether there are equivalent settings for pgAdmin and Toad and whatever other tools people are using for their interactive SQL sessions. But I do know that for all the new people coming to PostgreSQL right now (including lots at my company), none of them are going to know about this setting and personally I think the default is user-unfriendly.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-psql.html#id-1.9.4.18.8.5.2.9.17.1.2

A couple years back, some hackers discussed changing the default, and it was decided against (IIUC) because of concerns about broken scripts suddenly causing damage rather than aborting out. (About which... I think if a script is sending broken SQL, then it might not be checking error return values either and will likely keep running even after PostgreSQL ignores a few SQL statements after the error in the current session...)

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CABTbUpiAOKZ405uArt8cJFtC72RhzthmvWETQK_6Qw0Ad-HquQ%40mail.gmail.com

This thread on hackers actually seemed kindof short to me. Not nearly enough bike-shedding to call it a closed case. It also seems to me that the community has made significant changes across new major versions in the past, and this idea here might not be entirely off the table quite yet.

So...

Survey for the user community here on the pgsql-general list: it would be great if lots of people could chime in by answering two questions about your very own production environment:

question 1) are you worried about scripts in your production environment where damage could be caused by a different default in a future new major version of postgresql?  (not aborting transactions in interactive mode when syntax errors occur)

question 2) do you think the increased user-friendliness of changing this default behavior would be worthwhile for specific users in your organization who use postgresql?  (including both yourself and others you know of)

As someone working at a large company with an aweful lot of PostgreSQL, thinking of the internal production systems I'm aware of, I'd personally vote pretty strongly in favor of changing the default.

-Jeremy

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Jeremy Schneider
Database Engineer
Amazon Web Services