Re: Proposal for Allow postgresql.conf values to be changed via SQL

On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 03:15:07PM -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
> >> Well, Magnus' proposed implementation supposed that the existing values
> >> *have* been loaded into the current session.  I agree that with some
> >> locking and yet more code you could implement it without that.  But this
> >> still doesn't seem to offer any detectable benefit over value-per-file.
> >
> > Well, value-per-file is ugly (imagine you've set 40 different variables
> > that way) but dodges a lot of complicated issues.  And I suppose "ugly"
> > doesn't matter, because the whole idea of the auto-generated files is
> > that users aren't supposed to look at them anyway.
>
> That's pretty much how I feel about it, too.  I think value-per-file
> is an ugly wimp-out that shouldn't really be necessary to solve this
> problem.  It can't be that hard to rewrite a file where every like is
> of the form:
>
> key = 'value'
>
> However, as Josh said upthread, +1 for the implementation that will
> get committed.

Why do you think its that ugly? It seems to me the one-value-per-file
solution has the advantage of being relatively easy to integrate into
other systems that manage postgres' configuration.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

-- 
 Andres Freund	                   http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
 PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services