Expand section 5.6 "Privileges" to include the full definition of
each privilege type, and an explanation of aclitem privilege displays,
along with some helpful summary tables. Most of this material came
out of the GRANT reference page, although some of it is new.
Adjust a bunch of links that were pointing to GRANT to point to 5.6.
Fabien Coelho and Tom Lane, reviewed by Bradley DeJong
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/alpine.DEB.2.21.1807311735200.20743@lancre
"\pset format csv", or --csv, selects comma-separated values table format.
This is compliant with RFC 4180, except that we aren't too picky about
whether the record separator is LF or CRLF; also, the user may choose a
field separator other than comma.
This output format is directly compatible with the server's COPY CSV
format, and will also be useful as input to other programs. It's
considerably safer for that purpose than the old recommendation to
use "unaligned" format, since the latter couldn't handle data
containing the field separator character.
Daniel Vérité, reviewed by Fabien Coelho and David Fetter, some
tweaking by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/a8de371e-006f-4f92-ab72-2bbe3ee78f03@manitou-mail.org
This hasn't been correct since 9.3 added "latex-longtable".
I left the phraseology "Unique abbreviations are allowed" alone.
It's correct as far as it goes, and we are studiously refraining
from specifying exactly what happens if you give a non-unique
abbreviation. (The answer in the back branches is "you get a
backwards-compatible choice", and the answer in HEAD will shortly
be "you get an error", but there seems no need to mention such
details here.)
Daniel Vérité
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/cb7e1caf-3ea6-450d-af28-f524903a030c@manitou-mail.org
The ability to create like-named objects in different schemas opens up
the potential for users to change the behavior of other users' queries,
maliciously or accidentally. When you connect to a PostgreSQL server,
you should remove from your search_path any schema for which a user
other than yourself or superusers holds the CREATE privilege. If you do
not, other users holding CREATE privilege can redefine the behavior of
your commands, causing them to perform arbitrary SQL statements under
your identity. "SET search_path = ..." and "SELECT
pg_catalog.set_config(...)" are not vulnerable to such hijacking, so one
can use either as the first command of a session. As special
exceptions, the following client applications behave as documented
regardless of search_path settings and schema privileges: clusterdb
createdb createlang createuser dropdb droplang dropuser ecpg (not
programs it generates) initdb oid2name pg_archivecleanup pg_basebackup
pg_config pg_controldata pg_ctl pg_dump pg_dumpall pg_isready
pg_receivewal pg_recvlogical pg_resetwal pg_restore pg_rewind pg_standby
pg_test_fsync pg_test_timing pg_upgrade pg_waldump reindexdb vacuumdb
vacuumlo. Not included are core client programs that run user-specified
SQL commands, namely psql and pgbench. PostgreSQL encourages non-core
client applications to do likewise.
Document this in the context of libpq connections, psql connections,
dblink connections, ECPG connections, extension packaging, and schema
usage patterns. The principal defense for applications is "SELECT
pg_catalog.set_config('search_path', '', false)", and the principal
defense for databases is "REVOKE CREATE ON SCHEMA public FROM PUBLIC".
Either one is sufficient to prevent attack. After a REVOKE, consider
auditing the public schema for objects named like pg_catalog objects.
Authors of SECURITY DEFINER functions use some of the same defenses, and
the CREATE FUNCTION reference page already covered them thoroughly.
This is a good opportunity to audit SECURITY DEFINER functions for
robust security practice.
Back-patch to 9.3 (all supported versions).
Reviewed by Michael Paquier and Jonathan S. Katz. Reported by Arseniy
Sharoglazov.
Security: CVE-2018-1058
Since some preparation work had already been done, the only source
changes left were changing empty-element tags like <xref linkend="foo">
to <xref linkend="foo"/>, and changing the DOCTYPE.
The source files are still named *.sgml, but they are actually XML files
now. Renaming could be considered later.
In the build system, the intermediate step to convert from SGML to XML
is removed. Everything is build straight from the source files again.
The OpenSP (or the old SP) package is no longer needed.
The documentation toolchain instructions are updated and are much
simpler now.
Peter Eisentraut, Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
IDs in SGML are case insensitive, and we have accumulated a mix of upper
and lower case IDs, including different variants of the same ID. In
XML, these will be case sensitive, so we need to fix up those
differences. Going to all lower case seems most straightforward, and
the current build process already makes all anchors and lower case
anyway during the SGML->XML conversion, so this doesn't create any
difference in the output right now. A future XML-only build process
would, however, maintain any mixed case ID spellings in the output, so
that is another reason to clean this up beforehand.
Author: Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com>
For DocBook XML compatibility, don't use SGML empty tags (</>) anymore,
replace by the full tag name. Add a warning option to catch future
occurrences.
Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
"\if :{?variable_name}" will be translated to "\if TRUE" if the variable
exists and "\if FALSE" otherwise. Thus it will be possible to execute code
conditionally on the existence of the variable, regardless of its value.
Fabien Coelho, with some review by Robins Tharakan and some light text
editing by me.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/alpine.DEB.2.20.1708260835520.3627@lancre
This patch adds ERROR, SQLSTATE, and ROW_COUNT, which are updated after
every query, as well as LAST_ERROR_MESSAGE and LAST_ERROR_SQLSTATE,
which are updated only when a query fails. The expected usage of these
is for scripting.
Fabien Coelho, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/alpine.DEB.2.20.1704042158020.12290@lancre
This command acts somewhat like \g, but instead of executing the query
buffer, it merely prints a description of the columns that the query
result would have. (Of course, this still requires parsing the query;
if parse analysis fails, you get an error anyway.) We accomplish this
using an unnamed prepared statement, which should be invisible to psql
users.
Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Fabien Coelho
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFj8pRBhYVvO34FU=EKb=nAF5t3b++krKt1FneCmR0kuF5m-QA@mail.gmail.com
We already had a psql variable VERSION that shows the verbose form of
psql's own version. Add VERSION_NAME to show the short form (e.g.,
"11devel") and VERSION_NUM to show the numeric form (e.g., 110000).
Also add SERVER_VERSION_NAME and SERVER_VERSION_NUM to show the short and
numeric forms of the server's version. (We'd probably add SERVER_VERSION
with the verbose string if it were readily available; but adding another
network round trip to get it seems too expensive.)
The numeric forms, in particular, are expected to be useful for scripting
purposes, now that psql can do conditional tests.
Fabien Coelho, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/alpine.DEB.2.20.1704020917220.4632@lancre
Update the documentation for \pset to mention
columns|linestyle|pager_min_lines. Add various mentions of \pset
command equivalences that were previously inconsistent.
Author: Дилян Палаузов <dpa-postgres@aegee.org>
When materialized views were added, psql's \d commands were made to
treat them as a separate object category ... but not everyplace in the
documentation or comments got the memo.
Noted by David Johnston. Back-patch to 9.3 where matviews came in.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKFQuwb27M3VXRhHErjCpkWwN9eKThbqWb1=trtoXi9_ejqPXQ@mail.gmail.com
Various psql slash commands that normally act on the current query buffer
will automatically recall and re-use the most recently executed SQL command
instead, if the current query buffer is empty. Although this behavior is
ancient (dating apparently to commit 77a472993), it was documented nowhere
in the psql reference page. For that matter, we'd never bothered to define
the concept of "current query buffer" explicitly. Fix that. Do some
wordsmithing on relevant command descriptions to improve clarity and
consistency.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/9b4ea968-753f-4b5f-b46c-d7d3bf7c8f90@manitou-mail.org
Previously, text between backquotes in a psql metacommand's arguments
was always passed to the shell literally. That considerably hobbles
the usefulness of the feature for scripting, so we'd foreseen for a long
time that we'd someday want to allow substitution of psql variables into
the shell command. IMO the addition of \if metacommands has brought us to
that point, since \if can greatly benefit from some sort of client-side
expression evaluation capability, and psql itself is not going to grow any
such thing in time for v10. Hence, this patch. It allows :VARIABLE to be
replaced by the exact contents of the named variable, while :'VARIABLE'
is replaced by the variable's contents suitably quoted to become a single
shell-command argument. (The quoting rules for that are different from
those for SQL literals, so this is a bit of an abuse of the :'VARIABLE'
notation, but I doubt anyone will be confused.)
As with other situations in psql, no substitution occurs if the word
following a colon is not a known variable name. That limits the risk of
compatibility problems for existing psql scripts; but the risk isn't zero,
so this needs to be called out in the v10 release notes.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/9561.1490895211@sss.pgh.pa.us
This patch adds nestable conditional blocks to psql. The control
structure feature per se is complete, but the boolean expressions
understood by \if and \elif are pretty primitive; basically, after
variable substitution and backtick expansion, the result has to be
"true" or "false" or one of the other standard spellings of a boolean
value. But that's enough for many purposes, since you can always
do the heavy lifting on the server side; and we can extend it later.
Along the way, pay down some of the technical debt that had built up
around psql/command.c:
* Refactor exec_command() into a function per command, instead of
being a 1500-line monstrosity. This makes the file noticeably longer
because of repetitive function header/trailer overhead, but it seems
much more readable.
* Teach psql_get_variable() and psqlscanslash.l to suppress variable
substitution and backtick expansion on the basis of the conditional
stack state, thereby allowing removal of the OT_NO_EVAL kluge.
* Fix the no-doubt-once-expedient hack of sometimes silently substituting
mainloop.c's previous_buf for query_buf when calling HandleSlashCmds.
(It's a bit remarkable that commands like \r worked at all with that.)
Recall of a previous query is now done explicitly in the slash commands
where that should happen.
Corey Huinker, reviewed by Fabien Coelho, further hacking by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CADkLM=c94OSRTnat=LX0ivNq4pxDNeoomFfYvBKM5N_xfmLtAA@mail.gmail.com
It can often be useful to use expanded mode output (\x) for just a
single query. Introduce a \gx which acts exactly like \g except that it
will force expanded output mode for that one \gx call. This is simpler
than having to use \x as a toggle and also means that the user doesn't
have to worry about the current state of the expanded variable, or
resetting it later, to ensure a given query is always returned in
expanded mode.
Primairly Christoph's patch, though I did tweak the documentation and help
text a bit, and re-indented the tab completion section.
Author: Christoph Berg
Reviewed By: Daniel Verite
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170127132737.6skslelaf4txs6iw%40msg.credativ.de
Modify FETCH_COUNT to always have a defined value, like other control
variables, mainly so it will always appear in "\set" output.
Add hooks to force HISTSIZE to be defined and require it to have an
integer value. (I don't see any point in allowing it to be set to
non-integral values.)
Add hooks to force IGNOREEOF to be defined and require it to have an
integer value. Unlike the other cases, here we're trying to be
bug-compatible with a rather bogus externally-defined behavior, so I think
we need to continue to allow "\set IGNOREEOF whatever". Fix it so that
the substitution hook silently replace non-numeric values with "10",
so that the stored value always reflects what we're really doing.
Add a dummy assign hook for HISTFILE, just so it's always in
variables.c's list. We can't require it to be defined always, because
that would break the interaction with the PSQL_HISTORY environment
variable, so there isn't any change in visible behavior here.
Remove tab-complete.c's private list of known variable names, since that's
really a maintenance nuisance. Given the preceding changes, there are no
control variables it won't show anyway. This does mean that if for some
reason you've unset one of the status variables (DBNAME, HOST, etc), that
variable would not appear in tab completion for \set. But I think that's
fine, for at least two reasons: we shouldn't be encouraging people to use
those variables as regular variables, and if someone does do so anyway,
why shouldn't it act just like a regular variable?
Remove ugly and no-longer-used-anywhere GetVariableNum(). In general,
future additions of integer-valued control variables should follow the
paradigm of adding an assign hook using ParseVariableNum(), so there's
no reason to expect we'd need this again later.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/17516.1485973973@sss.pgh.pa.us
This commit improves on the results of commit 511ae628f in two ways:
1. It restores the historical behavior that "\set FOO" is interpreted
as setting FOO to "on", if FOO is a boolean control variable. We
already found one test script that was expecting that behavior, and
the psql documentation certainly does nothing to discourage people
from assuming that would work, since it often says just "if FOO is set"
when describing the effects of a boolean variable. However, now this
case will result in actually setting FOO to "on", not an empty string.
2. It arranges for an "\unset" of a control variable to set the value
back to its default value, rather than becoming apparently undefined.
The control variables are also initialized that way at psql startup.
In combination, these things guarantee that a control variable always
has a displayable value that reflects what psql is actually doing.
That is a pretty substantial usability improvement.
The implementation involves adding a second type of variable hook function
that is able to replace a proposed new value (including NULL) with another
one. We could alternatively have complicated the API of the assign hook,
but this way seems better since many variables can share the same
substitution hook function.
Also document the actual behavior of these variables more fully,
including covering assorted behaviors that were there before but
never documented.
This patch also includes some minor cleanup that should have been in
511ae628f but was missed.
Patch by me, but it owes a lot to discussions with Daniel Vérité.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/9572.1485821620@sss.pgh.pa.us
Previously, if the user set a special variable such as ECHO to an
unrecognized value, psql would bleat but store the new value anyway, and
then fall back to a default setting for the behavior controlled by the
variable. This was agreed to be a not particularly good idea. With
this patch, invalid values result in an error message and no change in
state.
(But this applies only to variables that affect psql's behavior; purely
informational variables such as ENCODING can still be set to random
values.)
To do this, modify the API for psql's assign-hook functions so that they
can return an OK/not OK result, and give them the responsibility for
printing error messages when they reject a value. Adjust the APIs for
ParseVariableBool and ParseVariableNum to support the new behavior
conveniently.
In passing, document the variable VERSION, which had somehow escaped that.
And improve the quite-inadequate commenting in psql/variables.c.
Daniel Vérité, reviewed by Rahila Syed, some further tweaking by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/7356e741-fa59-4146-a8eb-cf95fd6b21fb@mm
If the PAGER environment variable is set but contains an empty string,
psql would pass it to "sh" which would silently exit, causing whatever
query output we were printing to vanish entirely. This is quite
mystifying; it took a long time for us to figure out that this was the
cause of Joseph Brenner's trouble report. Rather than allowing that
to happen, we should treat this as another way to specify "no pager".
(We could alternatively treat it as selecting the default pager, but
it seems more likely that the former is what the user meant to achieve
by setting PAGER this way.)
Nonempty, but all-white-space, PAGER values have the same behavior, and
it's pretty easy to test for that, so let's handle that case the same way.
Most other cases of faulty PAGER values will result in the shell printing
some kind of complaint to stderr, which should be enough to diagnose the
problem, so we don't need to work harder than this. (Note that there's
been an intentional decision not to be very chatty about apparent failure
returns from the pager process, since that may happen if, eg, the user
quits the pager with control-C or some such. I'd just as soon not start
splitting hairs about which exit codes might merit making our own report.)
libpq's old PQprint() function was already on board with ignoring empty
PAGER values, but for consistency, make it ignore all-white-space values
as well.
It's been like this a long time, so back-patch to all supported branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFfgvXWLOE2novHzYjmQK8-J6TmHz42G8f3X0SORM44+stUGmw@mail.gmail.com
An example in the psql documentation had an incorrect field name from
what the command actually produced.
Pointed out by Fabien COELHO
Back-patch to 9.6 where the example was added.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/alpine.DEB.2.20.1611291349400.19314@lancre
In addition to the existing decimal-milliseconds output value,
display the same value in mm:ss.fff format if it exceeds one second.
Tack on hours and even days fields if the interval is large enough.
This avoids needing mental arithmetic to convert the values into
customary time units.
Corey Huinker, reviewed by Gerdan Santos; bikeshedding by many
Discussion: <CADkLM=dbC4R8sbbuFXQVBFWoJGQkTEW8RWnC0PbW9nZsovZpJQ@mail.gmail.com>
The decision to reuse values of parameters from a previous connection
has been based on whether the new target is a conninfo string. Add this
means of overriding that default. This feature arose as one component
of a fix for security vulnerabilities in pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and
pg_upgrade, so back-patch to 9.1 (all supported versions). In 9.3 and
later, comment paragraphs that required update had already-incorrect
claims about behavior when no connection is open; fix those problems.
Security: CVE-2016-5424
Add display of proparallel (parallel-safety) when the server is >= 9.6,
and display of proacl (access privileges) for all server versions.
Minor tweak of column ordering to keep related columns together.
Michael Paquier
Discussion: <CAB7nPqTR3Vu3xKOZOYqSm-+bSZV0kqgeGAXD6w5GLbkbfd5Q6w@mail.gmail.com>
Dilian Palauzov pointed out in bug #14201 that the docs failed to mention
the possibility of %R producing '(' due to an unmatched parenthesis.
He proposed just adding that in the same style as the other options were
listed; but it seemed to me that the sentence was already nearly
unintelligible, so I rewrote it a bit more extensively.
Report: <20160619121113.5789.68274@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Mostly these are just comments but there are a few in documentation
and a handful in code and tests. Hopefully this doesn't cause too much
unnecessary pain for backpatching. I relented from some of the most
common like "thru" for that reason. The rest don't seem numerous
enough to cause problems.
Thanks to Kevin Lyda's tool https://pypi.python.org/pypi/misspellings
\crosstabview interpreted its arguments in an unusual way, including
doing case-insensitive matching of unquoted column names, which is
surely not the right thing. Rip that out in favor of doing something
equivalent to the dequoting/case-folding rules used by other psql
commands. To keep it simple, change the syntax so that the optional
sort column is specified as a separate argument, instead of the
also-quite-unusual syntax that attached it to the colH argument with
a colon.
Also, rework the error messages to be closer to project style.
Fix misleading syntax summary (there cannot be a space between colH and
scolH). Provide a link from the existing crosstab() function's
documentation to \crosstabview. Copy-edit the command's description.
Christoph Berg and Tom Lane
\crosstabview is a completely different way to display results from a
query: instead of a vertical display of rows, the data values are placed
in a grid where the column and row headers come from the data itself,
similar to a spreadsheet.
The sort order of the horizontal header can be specified by using
another column in the query, and the vertical header determines its
ordering from the order in which they appear in the query.
This only allows displaying a single value in each cell. If more than
one value correspond to the same cell, an error is thrown. Merging of
values can be done in the query itself, if necessary. This may be
revisited in the future.
Author: Daniel Verité
Reviewed-by: Pavel Stehule, Dean Rasheed
