Re: Feature improvement: can we add queryId for pg_catalog.pg_stat_activity view?

On 2020-Oct-17, Julien Rouhaud wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 17, 2020 at 12:23 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> > then there's a potential security issue if the GUC is USERSET level:
> > a user could hide her queries from pg_stat_statement by turning the
> > GUC off. So this line of thought suggests the GUC needs to be at
> > least SUSET, and maybe higher ... doesn't pg_stat_statement need it
> > to have the same value cluster-wide?
>
> Well, I don't think that there's any guarantee that pg_stat_statemens
> will display all activity that has been run, since there's a limited
> amount of (userid, dbid, queryid) that can be stored, but I agree that
> allowing random user to hide their activity isn't nice. Note that I
> defined the GUC as SUSET, but maybe it should be SIGHUP?

I don't think we should consider pg_stat_statement a bulletproof defense
for security problems. It is already lossy by design.

I do think it'd be preferrable if we allowed it to be disabled at the
config file level only, not with SET (prevent users from hiding stuff);
but I think it is useful to allow users to enable it for specific
queries or for specific sessions only, while globally disabled. This
might mean we need to mark it PGC_SIGHUP and then have the check hook
disallow it from being changed under such-and-such conditions.