Re: ALTER USER SET log_* not allowed...

On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 13:58 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> Bruce and I were chatting about this on the phone today, and we were
> seriously considering a more radical proposal: get rid of the whole
> concept of USERLIMIT variables, and make the logging variables be plain
> SUSET (ie, only superusers can change 'em). This would eliminate the
> current ability of a non-superuser to increase the logging verbosity
> of his session, but it's not real clear that that's such a good idea
> anyway. (Cranking the log verbosity up far past what the DBA wants
> could be seen as a primitive form of DOS attack; and anyway, if you are
> not a superuser then you can't see what's in the log, so why should
> you care what the verbosity is, much less be able to affect it?) Given
> the code complexity of the USERLIMIT stuff and the number of bugs
> already found in it, getting rid of it seems awfully attractive.

The current functionality could be useful inside particular code paths
of an application, where you want to increase the log verbosity in a
particular part of the code, when it (unpredictably) happens, without
nuking the logs entirely.

Of course you are superuser when you review such logs, but I wouldn't
usually want the db connection from the application to have to run as
superuser if I could help it... especially not a web application.

Regards,
Andrew McMillan.

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