Re: Remote administration functionality

Dave Page wrote:
> > The idea of the patch was to give applications the full unix I/O
> > capabilities, allowing them to program these functions into
> > administration applications. I think the group generally would like a
> > higher-level API that allows something like:
> >
> > SET GLOBAL log_statement = 'mod';
>
> Sounds reasonable (and quite nice) for postgresql.conf, but consider
> pg_hba.conf. The production systems I run at work have heavily commented
> pg_hba.conf files, with entries that are intentionally ordered. As you
> know, unlike postgresql.conf, there is no fixed set of possible entries.
> How can we create a cleaner inteface for that, and be able to maintain
> annotations in the file in a way that works well when using tools and
> text editors at different times?

TODO has:

o Allow pg_hba.conf settings to be controlled via SQL

This would require a new global table that is dumped to flat file for
use by the postmaster. We do a similar thing for pg_shadow currently.

I was thinking of a global table that can be modified with
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE and is then dumped to a flat file, like we do with
pg_shadow. For changing the file, I think we would need a sequence
number for each row. In fact, perhaps it should act like a float, so if
you insert row sequence number 2.5, it goes between rows 2 and 3, and
then the rows are renumbered, perhaps automatically. This is how APL
programming used to work, if I remember correctly.

> > Given the confusion about the patch, I think we can give folks some time
> > to work on any additional remote administration bulleted items while we
> > clean out the patches queue.
>
> Thank you - and my apologies if anyone thought my previous rant came
> across too srongly, or was unjustified.

You comments were justified.

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Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
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