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
If we restrict unique constraints on partitioned tables so that they
must always include the partition key, then our standard approach to
unique indexes already works --- each unique key is forced to exist
within a single partition, so enforcing the unique restriction in each
index individually is enough to have it enforced globally. Therefore we
can implement unique indexes on partitions by simply removing a few
restrictions (and adding others.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171222212921.hi6hg6pem2w2t36z@alvherre.pgsql
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171229230607.3iib6b62fn3uaf47@alvherre.pgsql
Reviewed-by: Simon Riggs, Jesper Pedersen, Peter Eisentraut, Jaime
Casanova, Amit Langote
We can now create indexes more easily than before, so update this
chapter to use the simpler instructions.
After an idea of Amit Langote. I (Álvaro) opted to do more invasive
surgery and remove the previous suggestion to create per-partition
indexes, which his patch left in place.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/eafaaeb1-f0fd-d010-dd45-07db0300f645@lab.ntt.co.jp
Author: Amit Langote, Álvaro Herrera
When an UPDATE causes a row to no longer match the partition
constraint, try to move it to a different partition where it does
match the partition constraint. In essence, the UPDATE is split into
a DELETE from the old partition and an INSERT into the new one. This
can lead to surprising behavior in concurrency scenarios because
EvalPlanQual rechecks won't work as they normally did; the known
problems are documented. (There is a pending patch to improve the
situation further, but it needs more review.)
Amit Khandekar, reviewed and tested by Amit Langote, David Rowley,
Rajkumar Raghuwanshi, Dilip Kumar, Amul Sul, Thomas Munro, Álvaro
Herrera, Amit Kapila, and me. A few final revisions by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAJ3gD9do9o2ccQ7j7+tSgiE1REY65XRiMb=yJO3u3QhyP8EEPQ@mail.gmail.com
This adds a new object type "procedure" that is similar to a function
but does not have a return type and is invoked by the new CALL statement
instead of SELECT or similar. This implementation is aligned with the
SQL standard and compatible with or similar to other SQL implementations.
This commit adds new commands CALL, CREATE/ALTER/DROP PROCEDURE, as well
as ALTER/DROP ROUTINE that can refer to either a function or a
procedure (or an aggregate function, as an extension to SQL). There is
also support for procedures in various utility commands such as COMMENT
and GRANT, as well as support in pg_dump and psql. Support for defining
procedures is available in all the languages supplied by the core
distribution.
While this commit is mainly syntax sugar around existing functionality,
future features will rely on having procedures as a separate object
type.
Reviewed-by: Andrew Dunstan <andrew.dunstan@2ndquadrant.com>
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
Hash partitioning is useful when you want to partition a growing data
set evenly. This can be useful to keep table sizes reasonable, which
makes maintenance operations such as VACUUM faster, or to enable
partition-wise join.
At present, we still depend on constraint exclusion for partitioning
pruning, and the shape of the partition constraints for hash
partitioning is such that that doesn't work. Work is underway to fix
that, which should both improve performance and make partitioning
pruning work with hash partitioning.
Amul Sul, reviewed and tested by Dilip Kumar, Ashutosh Bapat, Yugo
Nagata, Rajkumar Raghuwanshi, Jesper Pedersen, and by me. A few
final tweaks also by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAAJ_b96fhpJAP=ALbETmeLk1Uni_GFZD938zgenhF49qgDTjaQ@mail.gmail.com
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
There is no need to forbid ALTER TABLE ONLY on partitioned tables,
when no partitions exist yet. This can be handy for users who are
building up their partitioned table independently and will create actual
partitions later.
In addition, this is how pg_dump likes to operate in certain instances.
Author: Amit Langote, with some error message word-smithing by me
This reverts commit 8355a011a0, which
turns out to have been a misguided effort. We can't really support
this in a partitioning hierarchy after all for exactly the reasons
stated in the documentation removed by that commit. It's still
possible to use ON CONFLICT .. DO NOTHING (or for that matter ON
CONFLICT .. DO UPDATE) on individual partitions if desired, but
but to allow this on a partitioned table implies that we have some
way of evaluating uniqueness across the whole partitioning
hierarchy, which is false.
Shinoda Noriyoshi noticed that the old code was crashing (which we
could fix, though not in a nice way) and Amit Langote realized
that this was indicative of a fundamental problem with the commit
being reverted here.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/ff3dc21d-7204-c09c-50ac-cf11a8c45c81@lab.ntt.co.jp
Also, recursively perform VACUUM and ANALYZE on partitions when the
command is applied to a partitioned table. In passing, some related
documentation updates.
Amit Langote, reviewed by Michael Paquier, Ashutosh Bapat, and by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/47288cf1-f72c-dfc2-5ff0-4af962ae5c1b@lab.ntt.co.jp
Add a section titled "Partitioned Tables" to describe what are
partitioned tables, partition, their similarities with inheritance.
The existing section on inheritance is retained for clarity.
Then add examples to the partitioning chapter that show syntax for
partitioned tables. In fact they implement the same partitioning
scheme that is currently shown using inheritance.
Amit Langote, with additional details and explanatory text by me
Previously, type "unknown" was labeled as a base type in pg_type, which
perhaps had some sense to it because you were allowed to create tables with
unknown-type columns. But now that we don't allow that, it makes more
sense to label it a pseudo-type. This has the additional effects of
forbidding use of "unknown" as a domain base type, cast source or target
type, PL function argument or result type, or plpgsql local variable type;
all of which seem like good holes to plug.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2L28uwwbL9HUM-WR=hromW1Cvamkn7O-g8fPY2m=_7muJ0oA@mail.gmail.com
We have had support for restrictive RLS policies since 9.5, but they
were only available through extensions which use the appropriate hooks.
This adds support into the grammer, catalog, psql and pg_dump for
restrictive RLS policies, thus reducing the cases where an extension is
necessary.
In passing, also move away from using "AND"d and "OR"d in comments.
As pointed out by Alvaro, it's not really appropriate to attempt
to make verbs out of "AND" and "OR", so reword those comments which
attempted to.
Reviewed By: Jeevan Chalke, Dean Rasheed
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20160901063404.GY4028@tamriel.snowman.net
Clarify documentation about inheritance of check constraints, in
particular mentioning the NO INHERIT option, which didn't exist when
this text was written.
Document that in an inherited query, the applicable row security policies
are those of the explicitly-named table, not its children. This is the
intended behavior (per off-list discussion with Stephen Frost), and there
are regression tests for it, but it wasn't documented anywhere user-facing
as far as I could find.
Do a bit of wordsmithing on the description of inherited access-privilege
checks.
Back-patch to 9.5 where RLS was added.
Standardize on "user_name" for a field name in related examples in
ddl.sgml; before we had variously "user_name", "username", and "user".
The last is flat wrong because it conflicts with a reserved word.
Be consistent about entry capitalization in a table in func.sgml.
Fix a typo in pgtrgm.sgml.
Back-patch to 9.6 and 9.5 as relevant.
Alexander Law
Apparently that's not obvious to everybody, so let's belabor the point.
In passing, document that DROP POLICY has CASCADE/RESTRICT options (which
it does, per gram.y) but they do nothing (I assume, anyway). Also update
some long-obsolete commentary in gram.y.
Discussion: <20160805104837.1412.84915@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
If there's anyplace in our SGML docs that explains this behavior, I can't
find it right at the moment. Add an explanation in "Dependency Tracking"
which seems like the authoritative place for such a discussion. Per
gripe from Michelle Schwan.
While at it, update this section's example of a dependency-related
error message: they last looked like that in 8.3. And remove the
explanation of dependency updates from pre-7.3 installations, which
is probably no longer worth anybody's brain cells to read.
The bogus error message example seems like an actual documentation bug,
so back-patch to all supported branches.
Discussion: <20160620160047.5792.49827@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Get rid of the false implication that PRIMARY KEY is exactly equivalent to
UNIQUE + NOT NULL. That was more-or-less true at one time in our
implementation, but the standard doesn't say that, and we've grown various
features (many of them required by spec) that treat a pkey differently from
less-formal constraints. Per recent discussion on pgsql-general.
I failed to resist the temptation to do some other wordsmithing in the
same area.
Commit 43cd468cf0 added some wording to create_policy.sgml purporting
to warn users against a race condition of the sort that had been noted some
time ago by Peter Geoghegan. However, that warning was far too vague to be
useful (or at least, I completely failed to grasp what it was on about).
Since the problem case occurs with a security design pattern that lots of
people are likely to try to use, we need to be as clear as possible about
it. Provide a concrete example in the main-line docs in place of the
original warning.
Some time back we agreed that row_security=off should not be a way to
bypass RLS entirely, but only a way to get an error if it was being
applied. However, the code failed to act that way for table owners.
Per discussion, this is a must-fix bug for 9.5.0.
Adjust the logic in rls.c to behave as expected; also, modify the
error message to be more consistent with the new interpretation.
The regression tests need minor corrections as well. Also update
the comments about row_security in ddl.sgml to be correct. (The
official description of the GUC in config.sgml is already correct.)
I failed to resist the temptation to do some other very minor
cleanup as well, such as getting rid of a duplicate extern declaration.
Specifically, make its effect independent from the row_security GUC, and
make it affect permission checks pertinent to views the BYPASSRLS role
owns. The row_security GUC thereby ceases to change successful-query
behavior; it can only make a query fail with an error. Back-patch to
9.5, where BYPASSRLS was introduced.
Every query of a single ENABLE ROW SECURITY table has two meanings, with
the row_security GUC selecting between them. With row_security=force
available, every function author would have been advised to either set
the GUC locally or test both meanings. Non-compliance would have
threatened reliability and, for SECURITY DEFINER functions, security.
Authors already face an obligation to account for search_path, and we
should not mimic that example. With this change, only BYPASSRLS roles
need exercise the aforementioned care. Back-patch to 9.5, where the
row_security GUC was introduced.
Since this narrows the domain of pg_db_role_setting.setconfig and
pg_proc.proconfig, one might bump catversion. A row_security=force
setting in one of those columns will elicit a clear message, so don't.
Foreign tables can now be inheritance children, or parents. Much of the
system was already ready for this, but we had to fix a few things of
course, mostly in the area of planner and executor handling of row locks.
As side effects of this, allow foreign tables to have NOT VALID CHECK
constraints (and hence to accept ALTER ... VALIDATE CONSTRAINT), and to
accept ALTER SET STORAGE and ALTER SET WITH/WITHOUT OIDS. Continuing to
disallow these things would've required bizarre and inconsistent special
cases in inheritance behavior. Since foreign tables don't enforce CHECK
constraints anyway, a NOT VALID one is a complete no-op, but that doesn't
mean we shouldn't allow it. And it's possible that some FDWs might have
use for SET STORAGE or SET WITH OIDS, though doubtless they will be no-ops
for most.
An additional change in support of this is that when a ModifyTable node
has multiple target tables, they will all now be explicitly identified
in EXPLAIN output, for example:
Update on pt1 (cost=0.00..321.05 rows=3541 width=46)
Update on pt1
Foreign Update on ft1
Foreign Update on ft2
Update on child3
-> Seq Scan on pt1 (cost=0.00..0.00 rows=1 width=46)
-> Foreign Scan on ft1 (cost=100.00..148.03 rows=1170 width=46)
-> Foreign Scan on ft2 (cost=100.00..148.03 rows=1170 width=46)
-> Seq Scan on child3 (cost=0.00..25.00 rows=1200 width=46)
This was done mainly to provide an unambiguous place to attach "Remote SQL"
fields, but it is useful for inherited updates even when no foreign tables
are involved.
Shigeru Hanada and Etsuro Fujita, reviewed by Ashutosh Bapat and Kyotaro
Horiguchi, some additional hacking by me
As pointed out by Robert, we should really have named pg_rowsecurity
pg_policy, as the objects stored in that catalog are policies. This
patch fixes that and updates the column names to start with 'pol' to
match the new catalog name.
The security consideration for COPY with row level security, also
pointed out by Robert, has also been addressed by remembering and
re-checking the OID of the relation initially referenced during COPY
processing, to make sure it hasn't changed under us by the time we
finish planning out the query which has been built.
Robert and Alvaro also commented on missing OCLASS and OBJECT entries
for POLICY (formerly ROWSECURITY or POLICY, depending) in various
places. This patch fixes that too, which also happens to add the
ability to COMMENT on policies.
In passing, attempt to improve the consistency of messages, comments,
and documentation as well. This removes various incarnations of
'row-security', 'row-level security', 'Row-security', etc, in favor
of 'policy', 'row level security' or 'row_security' as appropriate.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Andres pointed out that there was an extra ';' in equalPolicies, which
made me realize that my prior testing with CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS was
insufficient (it didn't always catch the issue, just most of the time).
Thanks to that, a different issue was discovered, specifically in
equalRSDescs. This change corrects eqaulRSDescs to return 'true' once
all policies have been confirmed logically identical. After stepping
through both functions to ensure correct behavior, I ran this for
about 12 hours of CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS runs of the regression tests
with no failures.
In addition, correct a few typos in the documentation which were pointed
out by Thom Brown (thanks!) and improve the policy documentation further
by adding a flushed out usage example based on a unix passwd file.
Lastly, clean up a few comments in the regression tests and pg_dump.h.
Address a few typos in the row security update, pointed out
off-list by Adam Brightwell. Also include 'ALL' in the list
of commands supported, for completeness.
Buildfarm member tick identified an issue where the policies in the
relcache for a relation were were being replaced underneath a running
query, leading to segfaults while processing the policies to be added
to a query. Similar to how TupleDesc RuleLocks are handled, add in a
equalRSDesc() function to check if the policies have actually changed
and, if not, swap back the rsdesc field (using the original instead of
the temporairly built one; the whole structure is swapped and then
specific fields swapped back). This now passes a CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS
for me and should resolve the buildfarm error.
In addition to addressing this, add a new chapter in Data Definition
under Privileges which explains row security and provides examples of
its usage, change \d to always list policies (even if row security is
disabled- but note that it is disabled, or enabled with no policies),
rework check_role_for_policy (it really didn't need the entire policy,
but it did need to be using has_privs_of_role()), and change the field
in pg_class to relrowsecurity from relhasrowsecurity, based on
Heikki's suggestion. Also from Heikki, only issue SET ROW_SECURITY in
pg_restore when talking to a 9.5+ server, list Bypass RLS in \du, and
document --enable-row-security options for pg_dump and pg_restore.
Lastly, fix a number of minor whitespace and typo issues from Heikki,
Dimitri, add a missing #include, per Peter E, fix a few minor
variable-assigned-but-not-used and resource leak issues from Coverity
and add tab completion for role attribute bypassrls as well.
While the space is optional, it seems nicer to be consistent with what
you get if you do "SET search_path=...". SET always normalizes the
separator to be comma+space.
Christoph Martin
This command provides an automated way to create foreign table definitions
that match remote tables, thereby reducing tedium and chances for error.
In this patch, we provide the necessary core-server infrastructure and
implement the feature fully in the postgres_fdw foreign-data wrapper.
Other wrappers will throw a "feature not supported" error until/unless
they are updated.
Ronan Dunklau and Michael Paquier, additional work by me
This patch adds the core-system infrastructure needed to support updates
on foreign tables, and extends contrib/postgres_fdw to allow updates
against remote Postgres servers. There's still a great deal of room for
improvement in optimization of remote updates, but at least there's basic
functionality there now.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by Alexander Korotkov and Laurenz Albe, and rather
heavily revised by Tom Lane.
Somewhere along the line, somebody decided to remove all trace of this
notation from the documentation text. It was still in the command syntax
synopses, or at least some of them, but with no indication what it meant.
This will not do, as evidenced by the confusion apparent in bug #7543;
even if the notation is now unnecessary, people will find it in legacy
SQL code and need to know what it does.
As of 9.2, constraint exclusion should work okay with prepared statements:
the planner will try custom plans with actual values of the parameters,
and observe that they are a lot cheaper than the generic plan, and thus
never fall back to using the generic plan. Noted by Tatsuhito Kasahara.
Previously, when executing an ON UPDATE SET NULL or SET DEFAULT action for
a multicolumn MATCH SIMPLE foreign key constraint, we would set only those
referencing columns corresponding to referenced columns that were changed.
This is what the SQL92 standard said to do --- but more recent versions
of the standard say that all referencing columns should be set to null or
their default values, no matter exactly which referenced columns changed.
At least for SET DEFAULT, that is clearly saner behavior. It's somewhat
debatable whether it's an improvement for SET NULL, but it appears that
other RDBMS systems read the spec this way. So let's do it like that.
This is a release-notable behavioral change, although considering that
our documentation already implied it was done this way, the lack of
complaints suggests few people use such cases.
... when talking about how good they are in replacement of bulk DELETE
in partitioned setups.
The original wording was a bit confusing.
Per an observation from David Wheeler.
This commit provides the core code and documentation needed. A contrib
module test case will follow shortly.
Shigeru Hanada, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas
Block elements with verbatim formatting (literallayout, programlisting,
screen, synopsis) should be aligned at column 0 independent of the surrounding
SGML, because whitespace is significant, and indenting them creates erratic
whitespace in the output. The CSS stylesheets already take care of indenting
the output.
Assorted markup improvements to go along with it.
The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
the default. This setting enables constraint exclusion checks only for
appendrel members (ie, inheritance children and UNION ALL arms), which are
the cases in which constraint exclusion is most likely to be useful. Avoiding
the overhead for simple queries that are unlikely to benefit should bring
the cost down to the point where this is a reasonable default setting.
Per today's discussion.
as those for inherited columns; that is, it's no longer allowed for a child
table to not have a check constraint matching one that exists on a parent.
This satisfies the principle of least surprise (rows selected from the parent
will always appear to meet its check constraints) and eliminates some
longstanding bogosity in pg_dump, which formerly had to guess about whether
check constraints were really inherited or not.
The implementation involves adding conislocal and coninhcount columns to
pg_constraint (paralleling attislocal and attinhcount in pg_attribute)
and refactoring various ALTER TABLE actions to be more like those for
columns.
Alex Hunsaker, Nikhil Sontakke, Tom Lane
constraints the planner is unable to disprove, hence simple btree-compatible
conditions should be used. We've seen people try to get cute with stuff
like date_part(something) = something at least twice now. Even if we
wanted to try to teach predtest.c about the properties of date_part,
most of the useful variants aren't immutable so nothing could be proved.