Re: Good News Everyone! + feature proposal

On Thu, 2023-10-05 at 02:22 +0000, Jon Erdman wrote:

> For the proposal (this one is a bit Apple specific): because my team
> offers managed postgres to our Apple-internal customers, many of whom
> are not database experts, or at least not postgres experts, we'd like to
> be able to toggle the availability of UNLOGGED tables in
> postgresql.conf, so our less clueful users have fewer footguns.
>
> So, my proposal is for a GUC to implement that, which would *OF COURSE*
> undefault to allowing UNLOGGED.

It certainly sounds harmless, but there are two things that make me
unhappy about this:

- Yet another GUC. It's not like we don't have enough of them.
(This is a small quibble.)

- This setting would influence the way SQL is processed.
We have had bad experiences with those; an often-quoted example is
the "autocommit" parameter that got removed in 7.4.
This certainly is less harmfuls, but still another pitfall that
can confuse users.

This reminds me of the proposal for a GUC to forbid UPDATE and DELETE
without a WHERE clause. That didn't get anywhere, see
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20160721045746.GA25043%40fetter.org

> PS: I'm SO happy that this phase of my postgres journey has finally
> started!!!!

I am happy for you.

Please don't be discouraged if some of your patches get stuck because
no consensus can be reached or because nobody cares enough. Your
contributions are still welcome. One good way to gain experience
is to review others' patches. In fact, you are expected to do that
if you submit your own.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe