Re: Addition of authenticated ID to pg_stat_activity

Greetings,

* Andres Freund (andres@anarazel.de) wrote:
> On 2021-04-26 11:34:16 +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> > 9afffcb has added the concept of authenticated identity to the
> > information provided in log_connections for audit purposes, with this
> > data stored in each backend's port.  One extra thing that can be
> > really useful for monitoring is the capability to track this
> > information directly in pg_stat_activity.
>
> I'm getting a bit worried about the incremental increase in
> pg_stat_activity width - it's probably by far the view that's most
> viewed interactively. I think we need to be careful not to add too niche
> things to it. This is especially true for columns that may be wider.
>
> It'd be bad for discoverability, but perhaps something like this, that's
> not that likely to be used interactively, would be better done as a
> separate function that would need to be used explicitly?

I mean.. we already have separate functions and views for this, though
they're auth-method-specific currently, but also provide more details,
since it isn't actually a "one size fits all" kind of thing like this
entire approach is imagining it to be.

Thanks,

Stephen