The PostgreSQL community debates ALTER SYSTEM
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By Jonathan Corbet April 8, 2024 Sometimes the smallest patches create the biggest discussions. A case in point would be the process by which the PostgreSQL community — not a group normally prone to extended, strongly worded megathreads — resolved the question of whether to merge a brief patch adding a new configuration parameter. Sometimes, a proposal that looks like a security patch is not, in fact, intended to be a security patch, but getting that point across can be difficult.
The PostgreSQL server is a complex beast that can be extensively configured and tuned for the environment in which it runs. There are, naturally, many configuration parameters available for administrators to work with. There are also two ways to set those parameters. In most deployments, perhaps, administrators will edit the postgresql.conf file to configure the system as needed. It is, however, also possible to adjust parameters within a running database with the ALTER SYSTEM command. Any changes made that way will be saved to a separate postgresql.auto.conf file, which is also read by the server at startup; these changes are thus persistent.
