Re: [HACKERS] ALTER SYSTEM for pg_hba.conf

On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 12:28 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> Generally speaking, an ALTER DATABASE is unlikely to make the cluster
> fail to start.  To be clear, I've only seen 1 or 2 cases and I'm not
> sure if, in those cases, they even fully understood how much can be
> changed through ALTER DATABASE or ALTER ROLE.

OK.

> My goal in those cases (and others where I come across installations
> with a lot of superusers) is typically to try and educate them as to
> just how close a superuser is to the unix user and recommend that they
> reconsider how they handle access privileges in the system (in
> particular, to try and get them to not have so many superusers and
> instead use other ways to give people access to what they need).

Makes sense.

> Of course, that tends to lead into things like "well, how do I make sure
> that user X has read rights on every table, always" or "how do I give
> someone the ability to terminate runaway queries that another user
> started."  We've made progress there, but there's more to do still.

I agree!

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