Re: Big problem

Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl(at)familyhealth(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
>> No sweat; we've seen this one before.

> Should this situation be prevented though?

I think the cure would probably be worse than the disease. To make any
serious attempt at preventing remove-the-last-superuser, we'd have to
make operations on pg_shadow grab exclusive lock. For instance, you
couldn't allow two backends to DROP USER in parallel; they might be
dropping the last two superusers, but neither one would think it was
creating a problem. And while we could theoretically make
CREATE/ALTER/DROP USER take such locks, I dunno how you make a straight
"DELETE FROM pg_shadow" do so.

The mistake has only come up two or three times that I can remember,
which doesn't elevate it to the category of stuff that I want to install
a lot of mechanism to prevent. Especially not mechanism that would get
in the way of reasonable uses. I think it's sufficient to have a
recovery procedure.

regards, tom lane