Re: how to gate experimental features (SQL/PGQ)

> On 14 Jan 2026, at 22:15, Matheus Alcantara <matheusssilv97@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 14/01/26 17:57, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:
>>> On 13 Jan 2026, at 15:16, Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> wrote:
>>> 2) A run-time setting (GUC) like experimental_pgq = on/off.  This would be checked in the relevant DDL (CREATE/ALTER/DROP) commands as well as the GRAPH_TABLE function.  So without that you couldn't do anything with it, but for example pg_dump and psql and ecpg preproc would still work and the system catalogs exist.  Default to off for one release (subject to change).
>> Such a GUC would IMHO only make sense if we remove it when we promote the
>> feature, but removing a GUC also comes with a cost for anyone having baked it
>> into their scripts etc.  If we feel confident enough that a patch satisfies the
>> security requirements to merge it, I think we should make it available.
> Instead of having a GUC for each potential experimental feature we could have just a single GUC with a list of experimental features that are enabled.
> 
> SET enable_experimental_features = "foo,bar,baz";

That is an option to avoid the need to retire/remove GUC's.  Such a format
makes it harder to know which experimental features which are disabled when
querying pg_settings or looking at it in other ways where the postgresql.conf
comment isn't immediately visible, but that might not be a big concern.

--
Daniel Gustafsson