Hiya Hackers!
So I have some good news! At long last I've found a company/manager that
wants to actually factually pay me to do some work on PG!!
Had my performance review today, and Apple wants me to get a patch
accepted this quarter, with the promise of more to come after that.
Luckily, this first patch can be anything (doesn't have to be of use to
Apple, more to prove that I can get a patch accepted), so I'm open to
suggestions of smaller stuff that is in demand at the moment.
For the proposal (this one is a bit Apple specific): because my team
offers managed postgres to our Apple-internal customers, many of whom
are not database experts, or at least not postgres experts, we'd like to
be able to toggle the availability of UNLOGGED tables in
postgresql.conf, so our less clueful users have fewer footguns.
So, my proposal is for a GUC to implement that, which would *OF COURSE*
undefault to allowing UNLOGGED.
The reasoning here is we have autofailover set up for our standard
cluster offering that we give to customers, using sync-rep to guarantee
no data loss if we flop to the HA node. Any users not up to speed on
what UNLOGGED really means could inadvertently lose data, so we'd like
to be able to force it to be off, and turn it on upon request after
educating the customer in question it's it's a valid use case.
So to begin with: I'm sure some folks will hate this idea, but maybe a
good many wont, and remember, this would default to UNLOGGED enabled, so
no change to current behaviour. and no encouragement to disallow it, but
just the ability to do so, which i think is useful in
hosted/managed/multi-tenant environment where most things are taken care
of for the customer.
So I'd like to get a general idea how likely this would be to getting
accepted if it did it, and did it right?
Let the flame war begin!
PS: I'm SO happy that this phase of my postgres journey has finally
started!!!!
--
Jon Erdman (aka StuckMojo on IRC)
PostgreSQL Zealot