Re: proposal: hide application_name from other users

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> * Harold Giménez (harold@heroku.com) wrote:
>> Definitely agree with you. This is just an example of how running
>> monitoring as superuser is not necessarily the worst thing, and there
>> are other reasons to do it already.
>
> It's a horrible thing and that isn't a good reason- if my database isn't
> accepting connections, I probably don't care one bit how bloated a table
> is.  Indeed, I care *more* that I'm out of connections and would want to
> know that ASAP.

This is a separate topic, but in such a case I'd want to know that
I've reached max_connections, which may not be a problem if I just
don't need any more connections, but I still need something connecting
to make sure the service is available at all and can respond to simple
SELECT 1 queries and a myriad of other things you'd want to keep track
of.

>
> That said, I'm not against the general idea that the 'reserved'
> connections be opened up to roles beyond superuser (or have some kind of
> priority system, etc), but that's an independent concern and should not
> be a justification for making monitoring require superuser privs.

+1

-Harold