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.
As pointed out by Michael Paquier, recovery_min_apply_delay didn't exist
in 9.0-9.3, making the release note text not very useful. Instead make it
talk about recovery_target_xid, which did exist then.
9.0 is already out of support, but we can fix the text in the newer
branches' copies of its release notes.
Empty ulink elements default to displaying the URL, so there is no need
to specify the URL again. This was already done for most occurrences,
but some cases didn't follow this convention.
Improve markup, particularly of the table of functions; add or improve
examples for some of the functions; wordsmith some of the function
descriptions.
Commit 33bd250f6c could have done with
some more review:
Adjust coding so that compilers unfamiliar with elog/ereport don't complain
about uninitialized values.
Fix misuse of PG_GETARG_INT16 to retrieve arguments declared as "integer"
at the SQL level. (This was evidently copied from cube_ll_coord and
cube_ur_coord, but those were wrong too.)
Fix non-style-guide-conforming error messages.
Fix underparenthesized if statements, which pgindent would have made a
hash of, and remove some unnecessary parens elsewhere.
Run pgindent over new code.
Revise documentation: repeated accretion of more operators without any
rethinking of the text already there had left things in a bit of a mess.
Merge all the cube operators into one table and adjust surrounding text
appropriately.
David Rowley and Tom Lane
Common mathematical convention is that exponentiation associates right to
left. We aren't going to change the parser for this, but we could note
it in the operator's description. (It's already noted in the operator
precedence/associativity table, but users might not look there.)
Per bug #13829 from Henrik Pauli.
Tone down an overly strong statement about which pseudo-types PLs are
likely to allow. Add "event_trigger" to the list, as well as
"pg_ddl_command" in 9.5/HEAD. Back-patch to 9.3 where event_trigger
was added.
Omitted boundaries represent the upper or lower limit of the corresponding
array subscript. This allows simpler specification of many common
use-cases.
(Revised version of commit 9246af6799)
YUriy Zhuravlev
Per a recommendation from Tomas Vondra, it's more helpful to refer to
the value that determines how skewed a Gaussian or exponential
distribution is as a parameter rather than a threshold.
Since it's not quite too late to get this right in 9.5, where it was
introduced, back-patch this. Most of the patch changes only comments
and documentation, but a few pgbench messages are altered to match.
Fabien Coelho, reviewed by Michael Paquier and by me.
Introduce distance operators over cubes:
<#> taxicab distance
<-> euclidean distance
<=> chebyshev distance
Also add kNN support of those distances in GiST opclass.
Author: Stas Kelvich
Previously, -j caused the entire input file to be read in and executed as
a single command string. That's undesirable, not least because any error
causes the entire file to be regurgitated as the "failing query". Some
experimentation suggests a better rule: end the command string when we see
a semicolon immediately followed by two newlines, ie, an empty line after
a query. This serves nicely to break up the existing examples such as
information_schema.sql and system_views.sql. A limitation is that it's
no longer possible to write such a sequence within a string literal or
multiline comment in a file meant to be read with -j; but there are no
instances of such a problem within the data currently used by initdb.
(If someone does make such a mistake in future, it'll be obvious because
they'll get an unterminated-literal or unterminated-comment syntax error.)
Other than that, there shouldn't be any negative consequences; you're not
forced to end statements that way, it's just a better idea in most cases.
In passing, remove src/include/tcop/tcopdebug.h, which is dead code
because it's not included anywhere, and hasn't been for more than
ten years. One of the debug-support symbols it purported to describe
has been unreferenced for at least the same amount of time, and the
other is removed by this commit on the grounds that it was useless:
forcing -j mode all the time would have broken initdb. The lack of
complaints about that, or about the missing inclusion, shows that
no one has tried to use TCOP_DONTUSENEWLINE in many years.
Clarify that SELECT policies are now applied when SELECT rights
are required for a given query, even if the query is an UPDATE or
DELETE query. Pointed out by Noah.
Additionally, note the risk regarding concurrently open transactions
where a relation which controls access to the rows of another relation
are updated and the rows of the primary relation are also being
modified. Pointed out by Peter Geoghegan.
Back-patch to 9.5.
This has worked that way for a long time, maybe always, but you would
not have known it from the documentation. Also back-patch the notes
I added to HEAD earlier today about behavior of the "-f -" switch,
which likewise have been valid for many releases.
Commit d5563d7df9 drew complaints from Coverity, which quite
correctly complained that one copy of each -c or -f string was being
leaked. What's more, simple_action_list_append was allocating enough space
for still a third copy of each string as part of the SimpleActionListCell,
even though that coding method had been superseded by a separate strdup
operation. There were some other minor coding infelicities too. The
documentation needed more work as well, eg it forgot to explain that -c
causes psql not to accept any interactive input.
To support this, we must reconcile some historical anomalies in the
behavior of -c. In particular, as a backward-incompatibility, -c no
longer implies --no-psqlrc.
Pavel Stehule (code) and Catalin Iacob (documentation). Review by
Michael Paquier and myself. Proposed behavior per Tom Lane.
Commit e7cb7ee145 provided basic
infrastructure for allowing a foreign data wrapper or custom scan
provider to replace a join of one or more tables with a scan.
However, this infrastructure failed to take into account the need
for possible EvalPlanQual rechecks, and ExecScanFetch would fail
an assertion (or just overwrite memory) if such a check was attempted
for a plan containing a pushed-down join. To fix, adjust the EPQ
machinery to skip some processing steps when scanrelid == 0, making
those the responsibility of scan's recheck method, which also has
the responsibility in this case of correctly populating the relevant
slot.
To allow foreign scans to gain control in the right place to make
use of this new facility, add a new, optional RecheckForeignScan
method. Also, allow a foreign scan to have a child plan, which can
be used to correctly populate the slot (or perhaps for something
else, but this is the only use currently envisioned).
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by Robert Haas, Etsuro Fujita, and Kyotaro
Horiguchi.
Commit d04c8ed904 added another support function to the GIST API,
but overlooked mentioning it in xindex.sgml's summary of index support
functions.
Anastasia Lubennikova
In commit 1ea0c73c2 I added a section to user-manag.sgml about how to drop
roles that own objects; but as pointed out by Stephen Frost, I neglected
that shared objects (databases or tablespaces) may need special treatment.
Fix that. Back-patch to supported versions, like the previous patch.
Allow pg_rewind to work when target timeline was switched. Now
user can return promoted standby to old master.
Target timeline history becomes a global variable. Index
in target timeline history is used in function interfaces instead of
specifying TLI directly. Thus, SimpleXLogPageRead() can easily start
reading XLOGs from next timeline when current timeline ends.
Author: Alexander Korotkov
Review: Michael Paquier
Previously, if no host information had been specified at connection time,
PQhost() would return NULL (unless you are on Windows, in which case you
got "localhost"). This is an unhelpful definition for a couple of reasons:
it can cause corner-case crashes in applications (cf commit c5ef8ce53d),
and there's no well-defined way for applications to find out the socket
directory path that's actually in use. As an example of the latter
problem, psql substituted DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR for NULL in a couple of
places, but this is subtly wrong because it's conceivable that psql is
using a libpq shared library that was built with a different setting.
Hence, change PQhost() to return DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR when appropriate,
and strip out the now-dead substitutions in psql. (There is still one
remaining reference to DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR in psql, in prompt.c, which
I don't see a nice way to get rid of. But it only controls a prompt
abbreviation decision, so it seems noncritical.)
Also update the docs for PQhost, which had never previously mentioned
the possibility of a socket directory path being returned. In passing
fix the outright-incorrect code comment about PGconn.pgunixsocket.
The POSIX standard for tar headers requires archive member sizes to be
printed in octal with at most 11 digits, limiting the representable file
size to 8GB. However, GNU tar and apparently most other modern tars
support a convention in which oversized values can be stored in base-256,
allowing any practical file to be a tar member. Adopt this convention
to remove two limitations:
* pg_dump with -Ft output format failed if the contents of any one table
exceeded 8GB.
* pg_basebackup failed if the data directory contained any file exceeding
8GB. (This would be a fatal problem for installations configured with a
table segment size of 8GB or more, and it has also been seen to fail when
large core dump files exist in the data directory.)
File sizes under 8GB are still printed in octal, so that no compatibility
issues are created except in cases that would have failed entirely before.
In addition, this patch fixes several bugs in the same area:
* In 9.3 and later, we'd defined tarCreateHeader's file-size argument as
size_t, which meant that on 32-bit machines it would write a corrupt tar
header for file sizes between 4GB and 8GB, even though no error was raised.
This broke both "pg_dump -Ft" and pg_basebackup for such cases.
* pg_restore from a tar archive would fail on tables of size between 4GB
and 8GB, on machines where either "size_t" or "unsigned long" is 32 bits.
This happened even with an archive file not affected by the previous bug.
* pg_basebackup would fail if there were files of size between 4GB and 8GB,
even on 64-bit machines.
* In 9.3 and later, "pg_basebackup -Ft" failed entirely, for any file size,
on 64-bit big-endian machines.
In view of these potential data-loss bugs, back-patch to all supported
branches, even though removal of the documented 8GB limit might otherwise
be considered a new feature rather than a bug fix.
The sepgsql docs included a comment that PG doesn't support RLS. That
is only true for versions prior to 9.5.
Update the docs for 9.5 and master to say that PG supports RLS but that
sepgsql does not yet.
Pointed out by Heikki.
Back-patch to 9.5
Commit a0d9f6e434 added this support for
all other plan node types; this fills in the gap.
Since TextOutCustomScan complicates this and is pretty well useless,
remove it.
KaiGai Kohei, with some modifications by me.
Also fill in the previously empty "major enhancements" list. YMMV as to
which items should make the cut, but it's past time we had something more
than a placeholder here.
(I meant to get this done before beta2 was wrapped, but got distracted by
PDF build problems. Better late than never.)
These were discussed in three different sections of the manual, which
unsurprisingly had diverged over time; and the descriptions of individual
variables lacked stylistic consistency even within each section (and
frequently weren't in very good English anyway). Clean up the mess, and
remove some of the redundant information in hopes that future additions
will be less likely to re-introduce inconsistency. For instance I see
no need for maintenance.sgml to include its very own list of all the
autovacuum storage parameters, especially since that list was already
incomplete.
Commit 8457d0beca introduced an example which, while not incorrect,
failed to exhibit the behavior it meant to describe, as a result of omitting
an E'' prefix that needed to be there. Noticed and fixed by Peter Geoghegan.
I (tgl) failed to resist the temptation to wordsmith nearby text a bit
while at it.
In commit a5ec86a7c7 I wrote a quick hack
that reduced the number of TeX string pool entries created while converting
our documentation to PDF form. That held the fort for awhile, but as of
HEAD we're back up against the same limitation. It turns out that the
original coding of \FlowObjectSetup actually results in *three* string pool
entries being generated for every "flow object" (that is, potential
cross-reference target) in the documentation, and my previous hack only got
rid of one of them. With a little more care, we can reduce the string
count to one per flow object plus one per actually-cross-referenced flow
object (about 115000 + 5000 as of current HEAD); that should work until
the documentation volume roughly doubles from where it is today.
As a not-incidental side benefit, this change also causes pdfjadetex to
stop emitting unreferenced hyperlink anchors (bookmarks) into the PDF file.
It had been making one willy-nilly for every flow object; now it's just one
per actually-cross-referenced object. This results in close to a 2X
savings in PDF file size. We will still want to run the output through
"jpdftweak" to get it to be compressed; but we no longer need removal of
unreferenced bookmarks, so we might be able to find a quicker tool for
that step.
Although the failure only affects HEAD and US-format output at the moment,
9.5 cannot be more than a few pages short of failing likewise, so it
will inevitably fail after a few rounds of minor-version release notes.
I don't have a lot of faith that we'll never hit the limit in the older
branches; and anyway it would be nice to get rid of jpdftweak across the
board. Therefore, back-patch to all supported branches.
Per discussion, the original name was a bit misleading, and
PQsslAttributeNames() seems more apropos. It's not quite too late to
change this in 9.5, so let's change it while we can.
Also, make sure that the pointer array is const, not only the pointed-to
strings.
Minor documentation wordsmithing while at it.
Lars Kanis, slight adjustments by me
Up until now, the total amount of data that could be passed to a
background worker at startup was one datum, which can be a small as
4 bytes on some systems. That's enough to pass a dsm_handle or an
array index, but not much else. Add a bgw_extra flag to the
BackgroundWorker struct, allowing up to 128 bytes to be passed to
a new worker on any platform.
Use this to fix a problem I recently discovered with the parallel
context machinery added in 9.5: the master assigns each worker an
array index, and each worker subsequently assigns itself an array
index, and there's nothing to guarantee that the two sets of indexes
match, leading to chaos.
Normally, I would not back-patch the change to add bgw_extra, since it
is basically a feature addition. However, since 9.5 is still in beta
and there seems to be no other sensible way to repair the broken
parallel context machinery, back-patch to 9.5. Existing background
worker code can ignore the bgw_extra field without a problem, but
might need to be recompiled since the structure size has changed.
Report and patch by me. Review by Amit Kapila.
The user can whitelist specified extension(s) in the foreign server's
options, whereupon we will treat immutable functions and operators of those
extensions as candidates to be sent for remote execution.
Whitelisting an extension in this way basically promises that the extension
exists on the remote server and behaves compatibly with the local instance.
We have no way to prove that formally, so we have to rely on the user to
get it right. But this seems like something that people can usually get
right in practice.
We might in future allow functions and operators to be whitelisted
individually, but extension granularity is a very convenient special case,
so it got done first.
The patch as-committed lacks any regression tests, which is unfortunate,
but introducing dependencies on other extensions for testing purposes
would break "make installcheck" scenarios, which is worse. I have some
ideas about klugy ways around that, but it seems like material for a
separate patch. For the moment, leave the problem open.
Paul Ramsey, hacked up a bit more by me
Standard-conforming literals have been the default for long enough that
it no longer seems necessary to go out of our way to tell people to write
regex escapes illegibly.
Fix some brain fade in commit a2dabf0e1d: erroneous variable names
in docs, rearrangements that made sentences less clear not more so,
undocumented and poorly-chosen-anyway API behaviors of subroutines,
bad grammar in error messages, copy-and-paste faults.
Albe Laurenz and Tom Lane
A lookbehind constraint is like a lookahead constraint in that it consumes
no text; but it checks for existence (or nonexistence) of a match *ending*
at the current point in the string, rather than one *starting* at the
current point. This is a long-requested feature since it exists in many
other regex libraries, but Henry Spencer had never got around to
implementing it in the code we use.
Just making it work is actually pretty trivial; but naive copying of the
logic for lookahead constraints leads to code that often spends O(N^2) time
to scan an N-character string, because we have to run the match engine
from string start to the current probe point each time the constraint is
checked. In typical use-cases a lookbehind constraint will be written at
the start of the regex and hence will need to be checked at every character
--- so O(N^2) work overall. To fix that, I introduced a third copy of the
core DFA matching loop, paralleling the existing longest() and shortest()
loops. This version, matchuntil(), can suspend and resume matching given
a couple of pointers' worth of storage space. So we need only run it
across the string once, stopping at each interesting probe point and then
resuming to advance to the next one.
I also put in an optimization that simplifies one-character lookahead and
lookbehind constraints, such as "(?=x)" or "(?<!\w)", into AHEAD and BEHIND
constraints, which already existed in the engine. This avoids the overhead
of the LACON machinery entirely for these rather common cases.
The net result is that lookbehind constraints run a factor of three or so
slower than Perl's for multi-character constraints, but faster than Perl's
for one-character constraints ... and they work fine for variable-length
constraints, which Perl gives up on entirely. So that's not bad from a
competitive perspective, and there's room for further optimization if
anyone cares. (In reality, raw scan rate across a large input string is
probably not that big a deal for Postgres usage anyway; so I'm happy if
it's linear.)
Show how this can be used in practice to make queries simpler and more
flexible. Also, draw an explicit contrast to the existence operator,
which doesn't work that way.
Peter Geoghegan and Tom Lane
Once upon a time we did not have a separate CREATEROLE privilege, and
CREATEUSER effectively meant SUPERUSER. When we invented CREATEROLE
(in 8.1) we also added SUPERUSER so as to have a less confusing keyword
for this role property. However, we left CREATEUSER in place as a
deprecated synonym for SUPERUSER, because of backwards-compatibility
concerns. It's still there and is still confusing people, as for example
in bug #13694 from Justin Catterson. 9.6 will be ten years or so later,
which surely ought to be long enough to end the deprecation and just
remove these old keywords. Hence, do so.
This fixes a long-standing bug which was discovered while investigating
the interaction between the new join pushdown code and the EvalPlanQual
machinery: if a ForeignScan appears on the inner side of a paramaterized
nestloop, an EPQ recheck would re-return the original tuple even if
it no longer satisfied the pushed-down quals due to changed parameter
values.
This fix adds a new member to ForeignScan and ForeignScanState and a
new argument to make_foreignscan, and requires changes to FDWs which
push down quals to populate that new argument with a list of quals they
have chosen to push down. Therefore, I'm only back-patching to 9.5,
even though the bug is not new in 9.5.
Etsuro Fujita, reviewed by me and by Kyotaro Horiguchi.
We hyphenate "fixed-length" earlier in the same sentence, and overall we
more often use "variable-length" rather than "variable length".
Nikolay Shaplov
In general one may have to run both REASSIGN OWNED and DROP OWNED to get
rid of all the dependencies of a role to be dropped. This was alluded to
in the REASSIGN OWNED man page, but not really spelled out in full; and in
any case the procedure ought to be documented in a more prominent place
than that. Add a section to the "Database Roles" chapter explaining this,
and do a bit of wordsmithing in the relevant commands' man pages.
Failure to perform garbage collection now has a user-visible effect, so
explain that and explain that reducing pgss_max is the way to prevent it.
Per gripe from Andrew Dunstan.
The documentation for the autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age and
autovacuum_freeze_max_age relation level parameters contained:
"Note that while you can set autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age very
small, or even zero, this is usually unwise since it will force frequent
vacuuming."
which hasn't been true since these options were made relation options,
instead of residing in the pg_autovacuum table (834a6da4f7).
Remove the outdated sentence. Even the lowered limits from 2596d70 are
high enough that this doesn't warrant calling out the risk in the CREATE
TABLE docs.
Per discussion with Tom Lane and Alvaro Herrera
Discussion: 26377.1443105453@sss.pgh.pa.us
Backpatch: 9.0- (in parts)
To allow users to force RLS to always be applied, even for table owners,
add ALTER TABLE .. FORCE ROW LEVEL SECURITY.
row_security=off overrides FORCE ROW LEVEL SECURITY, to ensure pg_dump
output is complete (by default).
Also add SECURITY_NOFORCE_RLS context to avoid data corruption when
ALTER TABLE .. FORCE ROW SECURITY is being used. The
SECURITY_NOFORCE_RLS security context is used only during referential
integrity checks and is only considered in check_enable_rls() after we
have already checked that the current user is the owner of the relation
(which should always be the case during referential integrity checks).
Back-patch to 9.5 where RLS was added.
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.
Without CASCADE, if an extension has an unfullfilled dependency on
another extension, CREATE EXTENSION ERRORs out with "required extension
... is not installed". That is annoying, especially when that dependency
is an implementation detail of the extension, rather than something the
extension's user can make sense of.
In addition to CASCADE this also includes a small set of regression
tests around CREATE EXTENSION.
Author: Petr Jelinek, editorialized by Michael Paquier, Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Michael Paquier, Andres Freund, Jeff Janes
Discussion: 557E0520.3040800@2ndquadrant.com
It's not terribly hard to devise regular expressions that take large
amounts of time and/or memory to process. Recent testing by Greg Stark has
also shown that machines with small stack limits can be driven to stack
overflow by suitably crafted regexps. While we intend to fix these things
as much as possible, it's probably impossible to eliminate slow-execution
cases altogether. In any case we don't want to treat such things as
security issues. The history of that code should already discourage
prudent DBAs from allowing execution of regexp patterns coming from
possibly-hostile sources, but it seems like a good idea to warn about the
hazard explicitly.
Currently, similar_escape() allows access to enough of the underlying
regexp behavior that the warning has to apply to SIMILAR TO as well.
We might be able to make it safer if we tightened things up to allow only
SQL-mandated capabilities in SIMILAR TO; but that would be a subtly
non-backwards-compatible change, so it requires discussion and probably
could not be back-patched.
Per discussion among pgsql-security list.
The "floatrange" example is a bit too simple because float8mi can be
used without any additional type conversion. Add an example that does
have to account for that, and do some minor other wordsmithing.