Hello, I've been using the Chef database cookbook and found it frustrating because it doesn't allow you to use peer authentication. The client process generally runs as root and connects to PostgreSQL using the Ruby pg gem. I have patched it to shell out to psql instead. This has the added benefit of not having to install "build-essential" on boxes that might otherwise be very minimal. This is normally needed to build the pg gem. I would therefore like to push the shell out approach but one problem remains. The cookbook currently uses PQexec so multiple SQL commands are wrapped in a transaction unless an explicit transaction instruction appears. I don't want to change this behaviour but the only way to get exactly the same effect from psql is to use the -c option. I suspect some may shove rather large SQL scripts through this to the extent that it may break the command line limit, if not on Linux, then perhaps on Windows, where I gather it's 32,768. Passing these scripts on the command line doesn't seem particularly elegant in any case. I'd really like to use stdin but this has different transactional behaviour. I thought about looking for instances of transaction instructions in advance but I have seen that PostgreSQL does not do this naively; it uses the lexer. Is there another way? Regards, James
