Previously synchronous replication offered only the ability to confirm
that all changes made by a transaction had been transferred to at most
one synchronous standby server.
This commit extends synchronous replication so that it supports multiple
synchronous standby servers. It enables users to consider one or more
standby servers as synchronous, and increase the level of transaction
durability by ensuring that transaction commits wait for replies from
all of those synchronous standbys.
Multiple synchronous standby servers are configured in
synchronous_standby_names which is extended to support new syntax of
'num_sync ( standby_name [ , ... ] )', where num_sync specifies
the number of synchronous standbys that transaction commits need to
wait for replies from and standby_name is the name of a standby
server.
The syntax of 'standby_name [ , ... ]' which was used in 9.5 or before
is also still supported. It's the same as new syntax with num_sync=1.
This commit doesn't include "quorum commit" feature which was discussed
in pgsql-hackers. Synchronous standbys are chosen based on their priorities.
synchronous_standby_names determines the priority of each standby for
being chosen as a synchronous standby. The standbys whose names appear
earlier in the list are given higher priority and will be considered as
synchronous. Other standby servers appearing later in this list
represent potential synchronous standbys.
The regression test for multiple synchronous standbys is not included
in this commit. It should come later.
Authors: Sawada Masahiko, Beena Emerson, Michael Paquier, Fujii Masao
Reviewed-By: Kyotaro Horiguchi, Amit Kapila, Robert Haas, Simon Riggs,
Amit Langote, Thomas Munro, Sameer Thakur, Suraj Kharage, Abhijit Menon-Sen,
Rajeev Rastogi
Many thanks to the various individuals who were involved in
discussing and developing this feature.
As noted by Julian Schauder in bug #14063, the configuration-file parser
doesn't support embedded newlines in string literals. While there might
someday be a good reason to remove that restriction, there doesn't seem
to be one right now. However, ALTER SYSTEM SET could accept strings
containing newlines, since many of the variable-specific value-checking
routines would just see a newline as whitespace. This led to writing a
postgresql.auto.conf file that was broken and had to be removed manually.
Pending a reason to work harder, just throw an error if someone tries this.
In passing, fix several places in the ALTER SYSTEM logic that failed to
provide an errcode() for an ereport(), and thus would falsely log the
failure as an internal XX000 error.
Back-patch to 9.4 where ALTER SYSTEM was introduced.
In this mode, the master waits for the transaction to be applied on
the remote side, not just written to disk. That means that you can
count on a transaction started on the standby to see all commits
previously acknowledged by the master.
To make this work, the standby sends a reply after replaying each
commit record generated with synchronous_commit >= 'remote_apply'.
This introduces a small inefficiency: the extra replies will be sent
even by standbys that aren't the current synchronous standby. But
previously-existing synchronous_commit levels make no attempt at all
to optimize which replies are sent based on what the primary cares
about, so this is no worse, and at least avoids any extra replies for
people not using the feature at all.
Thomas Munro, reviewed by Michael Paquier and by me. Some additional
tweaks by me.
Currently writes to the main data files of postgres all go through the
OS page cache. This means that some operating systems can end up
collecting a large number of dirty buffers in their respective page
caches. When these dirty buffers are flushed to storage rapidly, be it
because of fsync(), timeouts, or dirty ratios, latency for other reads
and writes can increase massively. This is the primary reason for
regular massive stalls observed in real world scenarios and artificial
benchmarks; on rotating disks stalls on the order of hundreds of seconds
have been observed.
On linux it is possible to control this by reducing the global dirty
limits significantly, reducing the above problem. But global
configuration is rather problematic because it'll affect other
applications; also PostgreSQL itself doesn't always generally want this
behavior, e.g. for temporary files it's undesirable.
Several operating systems allow some control over the kernel page
cache. Linux has sync_file_range(2), several posix systems have msync(2)
and posix_fadvise(2). sync_file_range(2) is preferable because it
requires no special setup, whereas msync() requires the to-be-flushed
range to be mmap'ed. For the purpose of flushing dirty data
posix_fadvise(2) is the worst alternative, as flushing dirty data is
just a side-effect of POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED, which also removes the pages
from the page cache. Thus the feature is enabled by default only on
linux, but can be enabled on all systems that have any of the above
APIs.
While desirable and likely possible this patch does not contain an
implementation for windows.
With the infrastructure added, writes made via checkpointer, bgwriter
and normal user backends can be flushed after a configurable number of
writes. Each of these sources of writes controlled by a separate GUC,
checkpointer_flush_after, bgwriter_flush_after and backend_flush_after
respectively; they're separate because the number of flushes that are
good are separate, and because the performance considerations of
controlled flushing for each of these are different.
A later patch will add checkpoint sorting - after that flushes from the
ckeckpoint will almost always be desirable. Bgwriter flushes are most of
the time going to be random, which are slow on lots of storage hardware.
Flushing in backends works well if the storage and bgwriter can keep up,
but if not it can have negative consequences. This patch is likely to
have negative performance consequences without checkpoint sorting, but
unfortunately so has sorting without flush control.
Discussion: alpine.DEB.2.10.1506011320000.28433@sto
Author: Fabien Coelho and Andres Freund
Renaming a file using rename(2) is not guaranteed to be durable in face
of crashes. Use the previously added durable_rename()/durable_link_or_rename()
in various places where we previously just renamed files.
Most of the changed call sites are arguably not critical, but it seems
better to err on the side of too much durability. The most prominent
known case where the previously missing fsyncs could cause data loss is
crashes at the end of a checkpoint. After the actual checkpoint has been
performed, old WAL files are recycled. When they're filled, their
contents are fdatasynced, but we did not fsync the containing
directory. An OS/hardware crash in an unfortunate moment could then end
up leaving that file with its old name, but new content; WAL replay
would thus not replay it.
Reported-By: Tomas Vondra
Author: Michael Paquier, Tomas Vondra, Andres Freund
Discussion: 56583BDD.9060302@2ndquadrant.com
Backpatch: All supported branches
Commit 4de82f7d7 increased the WAL flush rate, mainly to increase the
likelihood that hint bits can be set quickly. More quickly set hint bits
can reduce contention around the clog et al. But unfortunately the
increased flush rate can have a significant negative performance impact,
I have measured up to a factor of ~4. The reason for this slowdown is
that if there are independent writes to the underlying devices, for
example because shared buffers is a lot smaller than the hot data set,
or because a checkpoint is ongoing, the fdatasync() calls force cache
flushes to be emitted to the storage.
This is achieved by flushing WAL only if the last flush was longer than
wal_writer_delay ago, or if more than wal_writer_flush_after (new GUC)
unflushed blocks are pending. Based on some tests the default for
wal_writer_delay is 1MB, which seems to work well both on SSD and
rotational media.
To avoid negative performance impact due to 4de82f7d7 an earlier
commit (db76b1e) made SetHintBits() more likely to succeed; preventing
performance regressions in the pgbench tests I performed.
Discussion: 20160118163908.GW10941@awork2.anarazel.de
When force_parallel_mode = true, we enable the parallel mode restrictions
for all queries for which this is believed to be safe. For the subset of
those queries believed to be safe to run entirely within a worker, we spin
up a worker and run the query there instead of running it in the
original process. When force_parallel_mode = regress, make additional
changes to allow the regression tests to run cleanly even though parallel
workers have been injected under the hood.
Taken together, this facilitates both better user testing and better
regression testing of the parallelism code.
Robert Haas, with help from Amit Kapila and Rushabh Lathia.
Future PL/Java versions will close CVE-2016-0766 by making these GUCs
PGC_SUSET. This PostgreSQL change independently mitigates that PL/Java
vulnerability, helping sites that update PostgreSQL more frequently than
PL/Java. Back-patch to 9.1 (all supported versions).
Previously, the first error seen would be that postgresql.conf does not
exist. But for the case where the whole directory does not exist, give
an error message about that, together with a hint for how to create one.
Per a report from Shay Rojansky, Npgsql sends ssl_renegotiation_limit=0
in the startup packet because it does not support renegotiation; other
clients which have not attempted to support renegotiation might well
behave similarly. The recent removal of this parameter forces them to
break compatibility with either current PostgreSQL versions, or
previous ones. Per discussion, the best solution is to accept the
parameter but only allow a value of 0.
Shay Rojansky, edited a little by me.
A Gather executor node runs any number of copies of a plan in an equal
number of workers and merges all of the results into a single tuple
stream. It can also run the plan itself, if the workers are
unavailable or haven't started up yet. It is intended to work with
the Partial Seq Scan node which will be added in future commits.
It could also be used to implement parallel query of a different sort
by itself, without help from Partial Seq Scan, if the single_copy mode
is used. In that mode, a worker executes the plan, and the parallel
leader does not, merely collecting the worker's results. So, a Gather
node could be inserted into a plan to split the execution of that plan
across two processes. Nested Gather nodes aren't currently supported,
but we might want to add support for that in the future.
There's nothing in the planner to actually generate Gather nodes yet,
so it's not quite time to break out the champagne. But we're getting
close.
Amit Kapila. Some designs suggestions were provided by me, and I also
reviewed the patch. Single-copy mode, documentation, and other minor
changes also by me.
The old minimum values are rather large, making it time consuming to
test related behaviour. Additionally the current limits, especially for
multixacts, can be problematic in space-constrained systems. 10000000
multixacts can contain a lot of members.
Since there's no good reason for the current limits, lower them a good
bit. Setting them to 0 would be a bad idea, triggering endless vacuums,
so still retain a limit.
While at it fix autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age to refer to
multixact.c instead of varsup.c.
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas
Discussion: CA+TgmoYmQPHcrc3GSs7vwvrbTkbcGD9Gik=OztbDGGrovkkEzQ@mail.gmail.com
Backpatch: back to 9.0 (in parts)
Every query of a single ENABLE ROW SECURITY table has two meanings, with
the row_security GUC selecting between them. With row_security=force
available, every function author would have been advised to either set
the GUC locally or test both meanings. Non-compliance would have
threatened reliability and, for SECURITY DEFINER functions, security.
Authors already face an obligation to account for search_path, and we
should not mimic that example. With this change, only BYPASSRLS roles
need exercise the aforementioned care. Back-patch to 9.5, where the
row_security GUC was introduced.
Since this narrows the domain of pg_db_role_setting.setconfig and
pg_proc.proconfig, one might bump catversion. A row_security=force
setting in one of those columns will elicit a clear message, so don't.
Per discussion, nowadays it is possible to have tablespaces that have
wildly different I/O characteristics from others. Setting different
effective_io_concurrency parameters for those has been measured to
improve performance.
Author: Julien Rouhaud
Reviewed by: Andres Freund
It must be possible to multiply wal_buffers by XLOG_BLCKSZ without
overflowing int, or calculations in StartupXLOG will go badly wrong
and crash the server. Avoid that by imposing a maximum value on
wal_buffers. This will be just under 2GB, assuming the usual value
for XLOG_BLCKSZ.
Josh Berkus, per an analysis by Andrew Gierth.
While postgres' use of SSL renegotiation is a good idea in theory, it
turned out to not work well in practice. The specification and openssl's
implementation of it have lead to several security issues. Postgres' use
of renegotiation also had its share of bugs.
Additionally OpenSSL has a bunch of bugs around renegotiation, reported
and open for years, that regularly lead to connections breaking with
obscure error messages. We tried increasingly complex workarounds to get
around these bugs, but we didn't find anything complete.
Since these connection breakages often lead to hard to debug problems,
e.g. spuriously failing base backups and significant latency spikes when
synchronous replication is used, we have decided to change the default
setting for ssl renegotiation to 0 (disabled) in the released
backbranches and remove it entirely in 9.5 and master.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: 20150624144148.GQ4797@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.5 and master, 9.0-9.4 get a different patch
When enabling wal_compression, there is a risk to leak data similarly to
the BREACH and CRIME attacks on SSL where the compression ratio of
a full page image gives a hint of what is the existing data of this page.
This vulnerability is quite cumbersome to exploit in practice, but doable.
So this patch makes wal_compression PGC_SUSET in order to prevent
non-superusers from enabling it and exploiting the vulnerability while
DBA thinks the risk very seriously and disables it in postgresql.conf.
Back-patch to 9.5 where wal_compression was introduced.
This allows convenient checking for existence of a GUC from SQL, which is
particularly useful when dealing with custom variables.
David Christensen, reviewed by Jeevan Chalke
As first committed, this view reported on the file contents as they were
at the last SIGHUP event. That's not as useful as reporting on the current
contents, and what's more, it didn't work right on Windows unless the
current session had serviced at least one SIGHUP. Therefore, arrange to
re-read the files when pg_show_all_settings() is called. This requires
only minor refactoring so that we can pass changeVal = false to
set_config_option() so that it won't actually apply any changes locally.
In addition, add error reporting so that errors that would prevent the
configuration files from being loaded, or would prevent individual settings
from being applied, are visible directly in the view. This makes the view
usable for pre-testing whether edits made in the config files will have the
desired effect, before one actually issues a SIGHUP.
I also added an "applied" column so that it's easy to identify entries that
are superseded by later entries; this was the main use-case for the original
design, but it seemed unnecessarily hard to use for that.
Also fix a 9.4.1 regression that allowed multiple entries for a
PGC_POSTMASTER variable to cause bogus complaints in the postmaster log.
(The issue here was that commit bf007a27ac unintentionally reverted
3e3f65973a, which suppressed any duplicate entries within
ParseConfigFp. However, since the original coding of the pg_file_settings
view depended on such suppression *not* happening, we couldn't have fixed
this issue now without first doing something with pg_file_settings.
Now we suppress duplicates by marking them "ignored" within
ProcessConfigFileInternal, which doesn't hide them in the view.)
Lesser changes include:
Drive the view directly off the ConfigVariable list, instead of making a
basically-equivalent second copy of the data. There's no longer any need
to hang onto the data permanently, anyway.
Convert show_all_file_settings() to do its work in one call and return a
tuplestore; this avoids risks associated with assuming that the GUC state
will hold still over the course of query execution. (I think there were
probably latent bugs here, though you might need something like a cursor
on the view to expose them.)
Arrange to run SIGHUP processing in a short-lived memory context, to
forestall process-lifespan memory leaks. (There is one known leak in this
code, in ProcessConfigDirectory; it seems minor enough to not be worth
back-patching a specific fix for.)
Remove mistaken assignment to ConfigFileLineno that caused line counting
after an include_dir directive to be completely wrong.
Add missed failure check in AlterSystemSetConfigFile(). We don't really
expect ParseConfigFp() to fail, but that's not an excuse for not checking.
System catalogs and views should be listed alphabetically
in catalog.sgml, but only pg_file_settings view not.
This patch also fixes typos in pg_file_settings comments.
This undoes a poorly-thought-out choice in commit 970a18687f, namely
to export guc.c's internal variable data_directory. The authoritative
variable so far as C code is concerned is DataDir; there is no reason for
anything except specific bits of GUC code to look at the GUC variable.
After yesterday's commits fixing the fsync-on-restart patch, the only
remaining misuse of data_directory was in AlterSystemSetConfigFile(),
which would be much better off just using a relative path anyhow: it's
less code and it doesn't break if the DBA moves the data directory of a
running system, which is a case we've taken some pains over in the past.
This is mostly cosmetic, so no need for a back-patch (and I'd be hesitant
to remove a global variable in stable branches anyway).
The function and view added here provide a way to look at all settings
in postgresql.conf, any #include'd files, and postgresql.auto.conf
(which is what backs the ALTER SYSTEM command).
The information returned includes the configuration file name, line
number in that file, sequence number indicating when the parameter is
loaded (useful to see if it is later masked by another definition of the
same parameter), parameter name, and what it is set to at that point.
This information is updated on reload of the server.
This is unfiltered, privileged, information and therefore access is
restricted to superusers through the GRANT system.
Author: Sawada Masahiko, various improvements by me.
Reviewers: David Steele
This does four basic things. First, it provides convenience routines
to coordinate the startup and shutdown of parallel workers. Second,
it synchronizes various pieces of state (e.g. GUCs, combo CID
mappings, transaction snapshot) from the parallel group leader to the
worker processes. Third, it prohibits various operations that would
result in unsafe changes to that state while parallelism is active.
Finally, it propagates events that would result in an ErrorResponse,
NoticeResponse, or NotifyResponse message being sent to the client
from the parallel workers back to the master, from which they can then
be sent on to the client.
Robert Haas, Amit Kapila, Noah Misch, Rushabh Lathia, Jeevan Chalke.
Suggestions and review from Andres Freund, Heikki Linnakangas, Noah
Misch, Simon Riggs, Euler Taveira, and Jim Nasby.
This improves on commit bbfd7edae5 by
making two simple changes:
* pg_attribute_noreturn now takes parentheses, ie pg_attribute_noreturn().
Likewise pg_attribute_unused(), pg_attribute_packed(). This reduces
pgindent's tendency to misformat declarations involving them.
* attributes are now always attached to function declarations, not
definitions. Previously some places were taking creative shortcuts,
which were not merely candidates for bad misformatting by pgindent
but often were outright wrong anyway. (It does little good to put a
noreturn annotation where callers can't see it.) In any case, if
we would like to believe that these macros can be used with non-gcc
compilers, we should avoid gratuitous variance in usage patterns.
I also went through and manually improved the formatting of a lot of
declarations, and got rid of excessively repetitive (and now obsolete
anyway) comments informing the reader what pg_attribute_printf is for.
The introduction of min_wal_size & max_wal_size in 88e9823026 makes it
feasible to increase the default upper bound in checkpoint
size. Previously raising the default would lead to a increased disk
footprint, even if more segments weren't beneficial. The low default of
checkpoint size is one of common performance problem users have thus
increasing the default makes sense. Setups where the increase in
maximum disk usage is a problem will very likely have to run with a
modified configuration anyway.
Discussion: 54F4EFB8.40202@agliodbs.com,
CA+TgmoZEAgX5oMGJOHVj8L7XOkAe05Gnf45rP40m-K3FhZRVKg@mail.gmail.com
Author: Josh Berkus, after a discussion involving lots of people.
While the SQL standard is pretty vague on the overall topic of operator
precedence (because it never presents a unified BNF for all expressions),
it does seem reasonable to conclude from the spec for <boolean value
expression> that OR has the lowest precedence, then AND, then NOT, then IS
tests, then the six standard comparison operators, then everything else
(since any non-boolean operator in a WHERE clause would need to be an
argument of one of these).
We were only sort of on board with that: most notably, while "<" ">" and
"=" had properly low precedence, "<=" ">=" and "<>" were treated as generic
operators and so had significantly higher precedence. And "IS" tests were
even higher precedence than those, which is very clearly wrong per spec.
Another problem was that "foo NOT SOMETHING bar" constructs, such as
"x NOT LIKE y", were treated inconsistently because of a bison
implementation artifact: they had the documented precedence with respect
to operators to their right, but behaved like NOT (i.e., very low priority)
with respect to operators to their left.
Fixing the precedence issues is just a small matter of rearranging the
precedence declarations in gram.y, except for the NOT problem, which
requires adding an additional lookahead case in base_yylex() so that we
can attach a different token precedence to NOT LIKE and allied two-word
operators.
The bulk of this patch is not the bug fix per se, but adding logic to
parse_expr.c to allow giving warnings if an expression has changed meaning
because of these precedence changes. These warnings are off by default
and are enabled by the new GUC operator_precedence_warning. It's believed
that very few applications will be affected by these changes, but it was
agreed that a warning mechanism is essential to help debug any that are.
Until now __attribute__() was defined to be empty for all compilers but
gcc. That's problematic because it prevents using it in other compilers;
which is necessary e.g. for atomics portability. It's also just
generally dubious to do so in a header as widely included as c.h.
Instead add pg_attribute_format_arg, pg_attribute_printf,
pg_attribute_noreturn macros which are implemented in the compilers that
understand them. Also add pg_attribute_noreturn and pg_attribute_packed,
but don't provide fallbacks, since they can affect functionality.
This means that external code that, possibly unwittingly, relied on
__attribute__ defined to be empty on !gcc compilers may now run into
warnings or errors on those compilers. But there shouldn't be many
occurances of that and it's hard to work around...
Discussion: 54B58BA3.8040302@ohmu.fi
Author: Oskari Saarenmaa, with some minor changes by me.
When newly-added GUC parameter, wal_compression, is on, the PostgreSQL server
compresses a full page image written to WAL when full_page_writes is on or
during a base backup. A compressed page image will be decompressed during WAL
replay. Turning this parameter on can reduce the WAL volume without increasing
the risk of unrecoverable data corruption, but at the cost of some extra CPU
spent on the compression during WAL logging and on the decompression during
WAL replay.
This commit changes the WAL format (so bumping WAL version number) so that
the one-byte flag indicating whether a full page image is compressed or not is
included in its header information. This means that the commit increases the
WAL volume one-byte per a full page image even if WAL compression is not used
at all. We can save that one-byte by borrowing one-bit from the existing field
like hole_offset in the header and using it as the flag, for example. But which
would reduce the code readability and the extensibility of the feature.
Per discussion, it's not worth paying those prices to save only one-byte, so we
decided to add the one-byte flag to the header.
This commit doesn't introduce any new compression algorithm like lz4.
Currently a full page image is compressed using the existing PGLZ algorithm.
Per discussion, we decided to use it at least in the first version of the
feature because there were no performance reports showing that its compression
ratio is unacceptably lower than that of other algorithm. Of course,
in the future, it's worth considering the support of other compression
algorithm for the better compression.
Rahila Syed and Michael Paquier, reviewed in various versions by myself,
Andres Freund, Robert Haas, Abhijit Menon-Sen and many others.
Instead of having a single knob (checkpoint_segments) that both triggers
checkpoints, and determines how many checkpoints to recycle, they are now
separate concerns. There is still an internal variable called
CheckpointSegments, which triggers checkpoints. But it no longer determines
how many segments to recycle at a checkpoint. That is now auto-tuned by
keeping a moving average of the distance between checkpoints (in bytes),
and trying to keep that many segments in reserve. The advantage of this is
that you can set max_wal_size very high, but the system won't actually
consume that much space if there isn't any need for it. The min_wal_size
sets a floor for that; you can effectively disable the auto-tuning behavior
by setting min_wal_size equal to max_wal_size.
The max_wal_size setting is now the actual target size of WAL at which a
new checkpoint is triggered, instead of the distance between checkpoints.
Previously, you could calculate the actual WAL usage with the formula
"(2 + checkpoint_completion_target) * checkpoint_segments + 1". With this
patch, you set the desired WAL usage with max_wal_size, and the system
calculates the appropriate CheckpointSegments with the reverse of that
formula. That's a lot more intuitive for administrators to set.
Reviewed by Amit Kapila and Venkata Balaji N.
Replace the if-switch-case constructs with two conversion tables,
containing all the supported conversions between human-readable unit
strings and the base units used in GUC variables. This makes the code
easier to read, and makes adding new units simpler.
Previously when the standby server failed to retrieve WAL files from any sources
(i.e., streaming replication, local pg_xlog directory or WAL archive), it always
waited for five seconds (hard-coded) before the next attempt. For example,
this is problematic in warm-standby because restore_command can fail
every five seconds even while new WAL file is expected to be unavailable for
a long time and flood the log files with its error messages.
This commit adds new parameter, wal_retrieve_retry_interval, to control that
wait time.
Alexey Vasiliev and Michael Paquier, reviewed by Andres Freund and me.
While building error messages to return to the user,
BuildIndexValueDescription, ExecBuildSlotValueDescription and
ri_ReportViolation would happily include the entire key or entire row in
the result returned to the user, even if the user didn't have access to
view all of the columns being included.
Instead, include only those columns which the user is providing or which
the user has select rights on. If the user does not have any rights
to view the table or any of the columns involved then no detail is
provided and a NULL value is returned from BuildIndexValueDescription
and ExecBuildSlotValueDescription. Note that, for key cases, the user
must have access to all of the columns for the key to be shown; a
partial key will not be returned.
Further, in master only, do not return any data for cases where row
security is enabled on the relation and row security should be applied
for the user. This required a bit of refactoring and moving of things
around related to RLS- note the addition of utils/misc/rls.c.
Back-patch all the way, as column-level privileges are now in all
supported versions.
This has been assigned CVE-2014-8161, but since the issue and the patch
have already been publicized on pgsql-hackers, there's no point in trying
to hide this commit.
Fix unsafe use of a non-volatile variable in PG_TRY/PG_CATCH in
AlterSystemSetConfigFile(). While at it, clean up a bundle of other
infelicities and outright bugs, including corner-case-incorrect linked list
manipulation, a poorly designed and worse documented parse-and-validate
function (which even included some randomly chosen hard-wired substitutes
for the specified elevel in one code path ... wtf?), direct use of open()
instead of fd.c's facilities, inadequate checking of write()'s return
value, and generally poorly written commentary.
This allows it to be used with ALTER ROLE SET.
Although the old setting of PGC_BACKEND prevented changes after session
start, after discussion it was more useful to allow ALTER ROLE SET
instead and just document that changes during a session have no effect.
This is similar to how session_preload_libraries works already.
An alternative would be to change things to allow PGC_BACKEND and
PGC_SU_BACKEND settings to be changed by ALTER ROLE SET. But that might
need further research (e.g., log_connections would probably not work).
based on patch by Kyotaro Horiguchi
Fujii Masao
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Peter Eisentraut
Andres Freund
Noah Misch
Bruce Momjian
Alvaro Herrera
Heikki Linnakangas
Stephen Frost