Vendors keep patching settings so that it's incompatible e.g. with the #Prometheus postgres_exporter.
Exhibit A, Microsoft: added a custom integer GUC with value "Disabled" 🤡 github.com/prometheus-com (still an issue, but I got that PR committed as a work-around)
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Exhibit B, Amazon (Aurora): changed the shared_buffers settings (which is of type integer) to have a unit string at the end
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Exactly the reason why this patch would not be accepted by the community. Breaking things that are there for years. But this also slows down a better user experience 🤔 no really good solution. This parameters should have a numeric value and a display value
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This doesn't seem like a good example, though. Since shared_buffers can be set to values like "8GB", just like work_mem. Sure, shared_buffers uses pages as base units internally, whereas work_mem uses KiB. Mostly just implementation details, so unclear why AWS made this change.
What Amazon did is literally store "88413056kB" in the "setting" column for shared_buffers in pg_settings, while that GUC is of "vartype" integer; it's not about what Aurora accepts via SET etc.
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