No one really has thought of that before. We could do it, though there are admin reasons for restricting that ability. If we said only superusers could change it, it wouldn't be very useful.
That's a good point.
It would be cool if SET could change it, but it seems that would make it pretty
useless for administrator usage.
Ran into a situation yesterday where all connections were exhausted on a development database, and thanks to our nat-ing firewall, couldn't tell where all the connections were coming from. It made me think that intelligently mucking with the ps output might have made things easier for me to find the person to yell at.
One could just as easily report info like "real" client ip, client application state, etc, to a table, but having that stuff via 'ps' just seemed like a cool idea.
In addition, some of our applications have a few background threads that maintain persistent connections to the database. Being able to logically label those processes would make it easier to identify which backend processes are still connected.
eric
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