Re: Prepared transactions vs novice DBAs, again

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 13:48 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Another line of thought is that prepared xacts are inherently a bad
>> thing to be using if you have not done careful setup of a lot of
>> external infrastructure (in particular, have a transaction monitor
>> running somewhere). Therefore, the default out-of-the-box configuration
>> of Postgres shouldn't allow PREPARE TRANSACTION at all.

> Not sure what I think about this.

>> The main
>> objection to just setting max_prepared_transactions to zero by default
>> is that it would kill our ability to test the feature in the standard
>> regression tests.

> That kills it for me. Unless we want to change the way we test.

Well, I agree that losing regression testing of the feature would be a
Bad Thing. But we already require superuser privs to run the regression
tests. I'm thinking if we were to change things so that the regression
tests could temporarily turn on the ability to issue PREPARE
TRANSACTION, it would be possible to keep the testing but still have
the out-of-the-box configuration disable PREPARE TRANSACTION.

Anyway, as I said originally, this is all just brainstorming at this
point.

regards, tom lane