Mark search_path as GUC_REPORT

tvondra · tvondra · commit 28a1121fd912 · 2024-08-19T17:04:14.000+02:00
Report search_path changes to the client. Multi-tenant applications often map tenants to schemas, and use search_path to pick the tenant a given connection works with. This breaks when a connection pool (like PgBouncer), because the search_path may change unexpectedly. There are other GUCs we might want reported (e.g. various timeouts), but search_path is by far the biggest foot gun that can lead either to puzzling failures during query execution (when objects are missing or are defined differently), or even to accessing incorrect data. Many existing tools modify search_path, pg_dump being a notable example. Ideally, clients could specify which GUCs are interesting and should be subject to this reporting, but we don't support that. GUC_REPORT is what connection pools rely on for other interesting GUCs, so just use that. When this change was initially proposed in 2014, one of the concerns was impact on performance. But this was addressed by commit 2432b1a, which ensures we report each GUC at most once per query, no matter how many times it changed during execution. Eventually, this might be replaced / superseded by allowing doing this by making the protocol extensible in this direction, but it's unclear when (or if) that happens. Until then, we can leverage GUC_REPORT. Author: Alexander Kukushkin, Jelte Fennema-Nio Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFh8B=k8s7WrcqhafmYhdN1+E5LVzZi_QaYDq8bKvrGJTAhY2Q@mail.gmail.com
diff --git a/src/backend/utils/misc/guc_tables.c b/src/backend/utils/misc/guc_tables.c
@@ -4331,7 +4331,7 @@ struct config_string ConfigureNamesString[] =
 		{"search_path", PGC_USERSET, CLIENT_CONN_STATEMENT,
 			gettext_noop("Sets the schema search order for names that are not schema-qualified."),
 			NULL,
-			GUC_LIST_INPUT | GUC_LIST_QUOTE | GUC_EXPLAIN
+			GUC_LIST_INPUT | GUC_LIST_QUOTE | GUC_EXPLAIN | GUC_REPORT
 		},
 		&namespace_search_path,
 		"\"$user\", public",
