Re: SET variable - Permission issues

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 2:38 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Any developer who can't think of six ways to DOS the server without
> changing those settings should be fired on the spot for incompetence.

No kidding. But the point is that if the developer down the hall
maliciously destroys your database server, you can go through channels
and get him reprimanded or fired. But if the developer down the hall
is a new hire who doesn't know beans about PostgreSQL and tries
setting work_mem to 10GB, well, oops, it was an accident. And then
another developer gets hired three weeks later and does the same
thing. And then three months later somebody does it again. After a
while people no longer remember that in each case it was a developer
to blame. What they remember is that the DBA let the server go down
three times.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company