Re: Unsafe GUCs and ALTER SYSTEM WAS: Re: ALTER SYSTEM SET

On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 7:02 PM, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
> Nope.  ALTER SYSTEM, from my POV, is mainly for folks who *don't* use
> Puppet/Chef/whatever.  Here's where I see ALTER SYSTEM being useful:
>
> * invididually managed servers with out centralized management (i.e. one
> DBA, one server).

Well any server that is treated as a one-off rather than part of a
cluster of identical servers. That will actually be true for a lot of
users even if they have a slave or two and a development machine or
three. It's only when you start managing multiple production servers
for multiple databasees that you start to really see the benefits of
Puppet/Chef in solving your problems once for every server.

Fwiw It's not hard to imagine Puppet/Chef modules that *do* work
through ALTER SYSTEM and there would even be advantages. They could
easily check what the current value is and even adjust the values
differently for each system based on the environment. This is a bit
trickier to manage when rolling out files than it is when connected to
an instance. I would not be surprised to see both styles be quite
common, possibly even in the same environment for different settings
(I'm not saying I recommend that though).

-- 
greg