RE: Enhancement Idea - Expose the active value of a parameter in pg_settings

>> On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 10:11 AM, Andrew Dunstan
>> <andrew(dot)dunstan(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>>> He's proposing an extra column to show the actual value used, so
>>> distinguishing them should be a problem.
>
>> For most settings, that column would just be a duplicate. For a
>> handful, it would pull in the value of some other GUC. If somebody
>> finds that useful, cool, they can write a view that does it and
>> install it on their own cluster. I don't think that it makes a lot of
>> sense to put it in core, though. My guess would be that more people
>> would be annoyed or confused by the extra column than would be pleased
>> or enlightened by it. I could of course be wrong.
>
> Yeah, that's pretty much my evaluation --- given the tiny number of
> GUCs that have behaviors like this, an extra column seems like it
> would mostly be confusing. Plus, pg_settings is too darn wide already.
>
> Personally, what I'd rather do is try to get rid of GUC behaviors like
> "the effective value depends on something else". But convenience and
> backwards compatibility may be arguments against that.
>
> regards, tom lane

Many thanks for the quick consideration, even if it's ultimately a rejection. Figuring out some SQL that will work across all platforms, versions, and compile-time options will be "fun", but I'm up for a challenge.

It came about because I was scraping the entire cluster with "pgmetrics", and I was trying to reduce all "size" numeric settings down to bytes for them. I figured it would be nice if PostgreSQL could expose the data it's already got rather than forcing all external applications that want that data to do the same thing.

I'll deal with it externally, but I hope it was a reasonable proposal and not completely off-the-wall.

Regards,
Greg Clough.

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