Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2021 20:00:26 +0800
From: Julien Rouhaud <rjuju123@gmail.com>
To: Alex <cdalxndr@yahoo.com>
Cc: pgsql-bugs@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Invalid idle_in_transaction_session_timeout data type
Message-ID: <20210311120026.lf3cs332xvhm7qna@nol>
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On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 10:48:21AM +0000, Alex wrote:
> Documentation https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/runtime-config-client.html
> <https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/runtime-config-client.html> shows that
> `idle_in_transaction_session_timeout` is integer, bug you can set text
> values '30s' and `show idle_in_transaction_session_timeout` returns `30s`
> not an integer.
> Documentation should be updated to include this data field format.

The documentation is correct.  This parameter has a unit and you can therefore
use that unit for a better readability.  There's a mention of that on the
setting documentation:

If this value is specified without units, it is taken as milliseconds. A value
of zero (the default) disables the timeout.

If you want to get the stored value, without unit, you can use

SELECT setting FROM pg_settings WHERE name = 'guc_name';

For more details on how unit for GUC works, see the documentation at
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/config-setting.html:

Numeric with Unit: Some numeric parameters have an implicit unit, because they
describe quantities of memory or time. The unit might be bytes, kilobytes,
blocks (typically eight kilobytes), milliseconds, seconds, or minutes. An
unadorned numeric value for one of these settings will use the setting's
default unit, which can be learned from pg_settings.unit. For convenience,
settings can be given with a unit specified explicitly, for example '120 ms'
for a time value, and they will be converted to whatever the parameter's actual
unit is. Note that the value must be written as a string (with quotes) to use
this feature.