Back in 8.3, we installed permissions checks in these functions (see
commits 8bc225e799 and cc26599b72). But we forgot to document that
anywhere in the user-facing docs; it did get mentioned in the 8.3 release
notes, but nobody's looking at that any more. Per gripe from Suya Huang.
For variadic functions (other than VARIADIC ANY), the syntaxes foo(x,y,...)
and foo(VARIADIC ARRAY[x,y,...]) should be considered equivalent, since the
former is converted to the latter at parse time. They have indeed been
equivalent, in all releases before 9.3. However, commit 75b39e790 made an
ill-considered decision to record which syntax had been used in FuncExpr
nodes, and then to make equal() test that in checking node equality ---
which caused the syntaxes to not be seen as equivalent by the planner.
This is the underlying cause of bug #9817 from Dmitry Ryabov.
It might seem that a quick fix would be to make equal() disregard
FuncExpr.funcvariadic, but the same commit made that untenable, because
the field actually *is* semantically significant for some VARIADIC ANY
functions. This patch instead adopts the approach of redefining
funcvariadic (and aggvariadic, in HEAD) as meaning that the last argument
is a variadic array, whether it got that way by parser intervention or was
supplied explicitly by the user. Therefore the value will always be true
for non-ANY variadic functions, restoring the principle of equivalence.
(However, the planner will continue to consider use of VARIADIC as a
meaningful difference for VARIADIC ANY functions, even though some such
functions might disregard it.)
In HEAD, this change lets us simplify the decompilation logic in
ruleutils.c, since the funcvariadic/aggvariadic flag tells directly whether
to print VARIADIC. However, in 9.3 we have to continue to cope with
existing stored rules/views that might contain the previous definition.
Fortunately, this just means no change in ruleutils.c, since its existing
behavior effectively ignores funcvariadic for all cases other than VARIADIC
ANY functions.
In HEAD, bump catversion to reflect the fact that FuncExpr.funcvariadic
changed meanings; this is sort of pro forma, since I don't believe any
built-in views are affected.
Unfortunately, this patch doesn't magically fix everything for affected
9.3 users. After installing 9.3.5, they might need to recreate their
rules/views/indexes containing variadic function calls in order to get
everything consistent with the new definition. As in the cited bug,
the symptom of a problem would be failure to use a nominally matching
index that has a variadic function call in its definition. We'll need
to mention this in the 9.3.5 release notes.
The advice to join to pg_prepared_xacts via the transaction column was not
updated when the transaction column was replaced by virtualtransaction.
Since it's not quite obvious how to do that join, give an explicit example.
For consistency also give an example for the adjacent case of joining to
pg_stat_activity. And link-ify the view references too, just because we
can. Per bug #9840 from Alexey Bashtanov.
Michael Paquier and Tom Lane
It's been 16 bytes, not 12, for ages. This was fixed in passing in HEAD
(commit 146604ec), but as a factual error it should have been back-patched.
Per gripe from Tatsuhito Kasahara.
Any OS user able to access the socket can connect as the bootstrap
superuser and in turn execute arbitrary code as the OS user running the
test. Protect against that by placing the socket in the temporary data
directory, which has mode 0700 thanks to initdb. Back-patch to 8.4 (all
supported versions). The hazard remains wherever the temporary cluster
accepts TCP connections, notably on Windows.
Attempts to run "make check" from a directory with a long name will now
fail. An alternative not sharing that problem was to place the socket
in a subdirectory of /tmp, but that is only secure if /tmp is sticky.
The PG_REGRESS_SOCK_DIR environment variable is available as a
workaround when testing from long directory paths.
As a convenient side effect, this lets testing proceed smoothly in
builds that override DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR. Popular non-default values
like /var/run/postgresql are often unwritable to the build user.
Security: CVE-2014-0067
This has been true for some time, but we were leaving users to discover it
the hard way.
Back-patch to 9.2. It might've been true before that, but we were claiming
Python 2.2 compatibility before that, so I won't guess at the exact
requirements back then.
Since the temporary server started by "make check" uses "trust"
authentication, another user on the same machine could connect to it
as database superuser, and then potentially exploit the privileges of
the operating-system user who started the tests. We should change
the testing procedures to prevent this risk; but discussion is required
about the best way to do that, as well as more testing than is practical
for an undisclosed security problem. Besides, the same issue probably
affects some user-written test harnesses. So for the moment, we'll just
warn people against using "make check" when there are untrusted users on
the same machine.
In passing, remove some ancient advice that suggested making the
regression testing subtree world-writable if you'd built as root.
That looks dangerously insecure in modern contexts, and anyway we
should not be encouraging people to build Postgres as root.
Security: CVE-2014-0067
The primary role of PL validators is to be called implicitly during
CREATE FUNCTION, but they are also normal functions that a user can call
explicitly. Add a permissions check to each validator to ensure that a
user cannot use explicit validator calls to achieve things he could not
otherwise achieve. Back-patch to 8.4 (all supported versions).
Non-core procedural language extensions ought to make the same two-line
change to their own validators.
Andres Freund, reviewed by Tom Lane and Noah Misch.
Security: CVE-2014-0061
Granting a role without ADMIN OPTION is supposed to prevent the grantee
from adding or removing members from the granted role. Issuing SET ROLE
before the GRANT bypassed that, because the role itself had an implicit
right to add or remove members. Plug that hole by recognizing that
implicit right only when the session user matches the current role.
Additionally, do not recognize it during a security-restricted operation
or during execution of a SECURITY DEFINER function. The restriction on
SECURITY DEFINER is not security-critical. However, it seems best for a
user testing his own SECURITY DEFINER function to see the same behavior
others will see. Back-patch to 8.4 (all supported versions).
The SQL standards do not conflate roles and users as PostgreSQL does;
only SQL roles have members, and only SQL users initiate sessions. An
application using PostgreSQL users and roles as SQL users and roles will
never attempt to grant membership in the role that is the session user,
so the implicit right to add or remove members will never arise.
The security impact was mostly that a role member could revoke access
from others, contrary to the wishes of his own grantor. Unapproved role
member additions are less notable, because the member can still largely
achieve that by creating a view or a SECURITY DEFINER function.
Reviewed by Andres Freund and Tom Lane. Reported, independently, by
Jonas Sundman and Noah Misch.
Security: CVE-2014-0060
This documentation never got the word about the existence of check-world or
installcheck-world. Revise to recommend use of those, and document all the
subsidiary test suites. Do some minor wordsmithing elsewhere, too.
In passing, remove markup related to generation of plain-text regression
test instructions, since we don't do that anymore.
Back-patch to 9.1 where check-world was added. (installcheck-world exists
in 9.0; but since check-world doesn't, this patch would need additional
work to cover that branch, and it doesn't seem worth the effort.)
The documentation suggested using "echo | psql", but not the often-superior
alternative of a here-document. Also, be more direct about suggesting
that people avoid -c for multiple commands. Per discussion.
Previously we were piggybacking on transaction ID parameters to freeze
multixacts; but since there isn't necessarily any relationship between
rates of Xid and multixact consumption, this turns out not to be a good
idea.
Therefore, we now have multixact-specific freezing parameters:
vacuum_multixact_freeze_min_age: when to remove multis as we come across
them in vacuum (default to 5 million, i.e. early in comparison to Xid's
default of 50 million)
vacuum_multixact_freeze_table_age: when to force whole-table scans
instead of scanning only the pages marked as not all visible in
visibility map (default to 150 million, same as for Xids). Whichever of
both which reaches the 150 million mark earlier will cause a whole-table
scan.
autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age: when for cause emergency,
uninterruptible whole-table scans (default to 400 million, double as
that for Xids). This means there shouldn't be more frequent emergency
vacuuming than previously, unless multixacts are being used very
rapidly.
Backpatch to 9.3 where multixacts were made to persist enough to require
freezing. To avoid an ABI break in 9.3, VacuumStmt has a couple of
fields in an unnatural place, and StdRdOptions is split in two so that
the newly added fields can go at the end.
Patch by me, reviewed by Robert Haas, with additional input from Andres
Freund and Tom Lane.
We have a practice of providing a "bread crumb" trail between the minor
versions where the migration section actually tells you to do something.
Historically that was just plain text, eg, "see the release notes for
9.2.4"; but if you're using a browser or PDF reader, it's a lot nicer
if it's a live hyperlink. So use "<xref>" instead. Any argument against
doing this vanished with the recent decommissioning of plain-text release
notes.
Vik Fearing
Providing this information as plain text was doubtless worth the trouble
ten years ago, but it seems likely that hardly anyone reads it in this
format anymore. And the effort required to maintain these files (in the
form of extra-complex markup rules in the relevant parts of the SGML
documentation) is significant. So, let's stop doing that and rely solely
on the other documentation formats.
Per discussion, the plain-text INSTALL instructions might still be worth
their keep, so we continue to generate that file.
Rather than remove HISTORY and src/test/regress/README from distribution
tarballs entirely, replace them with simple stub files that tell the reader
where to find the relevant documentation. This is mainly to avoid possibly
breaking packaging recipes that expect these files to exist.
Back-patch to all supported branches, because simplifying the markup
requirements for release notes won't help much unless we do it in all
branches.
Primarily, explain where to find the system-wide psqlrc file, per recent
gripe from John Sutton. Do some general wordsmithing and improve the
markup, too.
Also adjust psqlrc.sample so its comments about file location are somewhat
trustworthy. (Not sure why we bother with this file when it's empty,
but whatever.)
Back-patch to 9.2 where the startup file naming scheme was last changed.
These things didn't work because the planner omitted to do the necessary
preprocessing of a WindowFunc's argument list. Add the few dozen lines
of code needed to handle that.
Although this sounds like a feature addition, it's really a bug fix because
the default-argument case was likely to crash previously, due to lack of
checking of the number of supplied arguments in the built-in window
functions. It's not a security issue because there's no way for a
non-superuser to create a window function definition with defaults that
refers to a built-in C function, but nonetheless people might be annoyed
that it crashes rather than producing a useful error message. So
back-patch as far as the patch applies easily, which turns out to be 9.2.
I'll put a band-aid in earlier versions as a separate patch.
(Note that these features still don't work for aggregates, and fixing that
case will be harder since we represent aggregate arg lists as target lists
not bare expression lists. There's no crash risk though because CREATE
AGGREGATE doesn't accept defaults, and we reject named-argument notation
when parsing an aggregate call.)
For rather inscrutable reasons, SQL:2008 disallows copying-and-modifying a
window definition that has any explicit framing clause. The error message
we gave for this only made sense if the referencing window definition
itself contains an explicit framing clause, which it might well not.
Moreover, in the context of an OVER clause it's not exactly obvious that
"OVER (windowname)" implies copy-and-modify while "OVER windowname" does
not. This has led to multiple complaints, eg bug #5199 from Iliya
Krapchatov. Change to a hopefully more intelligible error message, and
in the case where we have just "OVER (windowname)", add a HINT suggesting
that omitting the parentheses will fix it. Also improve the related
documentation. Back-patch to all supported branches.
SGML documentation, as well as code comments, failed to note that an FDW's
validator will be applied to foreign-table options for foreign tables using
the FDW.
Etsuro Fujita
The previous coding attempted to activate all the GUC settings specified
in SET clauses, so that the function validator could operate in the GUC
environment expected by the function body. However, this is problematic
when restoring a dump, since the SET clauses might refer to database
objects that don't exist yet. We already have the parameter
check_function_bodies that's meant to prevent forward references in
function definitions from breaking dumps, so let's change CREATE FUNCTION
to not install the SET values if check_function_bodies is off.
Authors of function validators were already advised not to make any
"context sensitive" checks when check_function_bodies is off, if indeed
they're checking anything at all in that mode. But extend the
documentation to point out the GUC issue in particular.
(Note that we still check the SET clauses to some extent; the behavior
with !check_function_bodies is now approximately equivalent to what ALTER
DATABASE/ROLE have been doing for awhile with context-dependent GUCs.)
This problem can be demonstrated in all active branches, so back-patch
all the way.
It seems like a good idea to update these examples since some fairly
basic planner behaviors have changed in 9.3; notably that the startup cost
for an indexscan plan node is no longer invariably estimated at 0.00.
Currently we don't need to update the pg_tablespace catalog
after redefining the symbolic links to the tablespaces
because pg_tablespace.spclocation column was removed in
PostgreSQL 9.2.
Back patch to 9.2 where pg_tablespace.spclocation was removed.
Ian Barwick, with minor change by me.
plpgsql often just remembers SPI-result tuple tables in local variables,
and has no mechanism for freeing them if an ereport(ERROR) causes an escape
out of the execution function whose local variable it is. In the original
coding, that wasn't a problem because the tuple table would be cleaned up
when the function's SPI context went away during transaction abort.
However, once plpgsql grew the ability to trap exceptions, repeated
trapping of errors within a function could result in significant
intra-function-call memory leakage, as illustrated in bug #8279 from
Chad Wagner.
We could fix this locally in plpgsql with a bunch of PG_TRY/PG_CATCH
coding, but that would be tedious, probably slow, and prone to bugs of
omission; moreover it would do nothing for similar risks elsewhere.
What seems like a better plan is to make SPI itself responsible for
freeing tuple tables at subtransaction abort. This patch attacks the
problem that way, keeping a list of live tuple tables within each SPI
function context. Currently, such freeing is automatic for tuple tables
made within the failed subtransaction. We might later add a SPI call to
mark a tuple table as not to be freed this way, allowing callers to opt
out; but until someone exhibits a clear use-case for such behavior, it
doesn't seem worth bothering.
A very useful side-effect of this change is that SPI_freetuptable() can
now defend itself against bad calls, such as duplicate free requests;
this should make things more robust in many places. (In particular,
this reduces the risks involved if a third-party extension contains
now-redundant SPI_freetuptable() calls in error cleanup code.)
Even though the leakage problem is of long standing, it seems imprudent
to back-patch this into stable branches, since it does represent an API
semantics change for SPI users. We'll patch this in 9.3, but live with
the leakage in older branches.
Commit 7f7485a0cd made these changes
in master; per discussion, backport the API changes (but not the
functional changes), so that people don't get used to the 9.3 API
only to see it get broken in the next release. There are already
some people coding to the original 9.3 API, and this will cause
minor breakage, but there will be even more if we wait until next
year to roll out these changes.
Per discussion on pgsql-hackers, these aren't really needed. Interim
versions of the background worker patch had the worker starting with
signals already unblocked, which would have made this necessary.
But the final version does not, so we don't really need it; and it
doesn't work well with the new facility for starting dynamic background
workers, so just rip it out.
Also per discussion on pgsql-hackers, back-patch this change to 9.3.
It's best to get the API break out of the way before we do an
official release of this facility, to avoid more pain for extension
authors later.
The documentation for ALTER VIEW had a minor copy-and-paste error in
defining the parameters. Noticed when reviewing the WITH CHECK OPTION
patch.
Backpatch to 9.2 where this was first introduced.
This makes superuser-issued REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW safe regardless of
the object's provenance. REINDEX is an earlier example of this pattern.
As a downside, functions called from materialized views must tolerate
running in a security-restricted operation. CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW
need not change user ID. Nonetheless, avoid creation of materialized
views that will invariably fail REFRESH by making it, too, start a
security-restricted operation.
Back-patch to 9.3 so materialized views have this from the beginning.
Reviewed by Kevin Grittner.
Previously, pg_upgrade docs recommended using .pgpass if using MD5
authentication to avoid being prompted for a password. Turns out pg_ctl
never prompts for a password, so MD5 requires .pgpass --- document that.
Also recommend 'peer' for authentication too.
Backpatch back to 9.1.
Specifically, permit attaching them to the error in RAISE and retrieving
them from a caught error in GET STACKED DIAGNOSTICS. RAISE enforces
nothing about the content of the fields; for its purposes, they are just
additional string fields. Consequently, clarify in the protocol and
libpq documentation that the usual relationships between error fields,
like a schema name appearing wherever a table name appears, are not
universal. This freedom has other applications; consider a FDW
propagating an error from an RDBMS having no schema support.
Back-patch to 9.3, where core support for the error fields was
introduced. This prevents the confusion of having a release where libpq
exposes the fields and PL/pgSQL does not.
Pavel Stehule, lexical revisions by Noah Misch.
Make it easier for readers of the FP docs to find out about possibly
truncated values.
Per complaint from Tom Duffey in message
F0E0F874-C86F-48D1-AA2A-0C5365BF5118@trillitech.com
Author: Albe Laurenz
Reviewed by: Abhijit Menon-Sen
On Unix, you can embed double-quotes in single-quotes, and via versa.
However, on Windows, you can only escape double-quotes in double-quotes,
so use that in the pg_dump -t/table example.
Backpatch to 9.3.
Report from Mike Toews
Adjust the wording in the first para of "Sequence Manipulation Functions"
so that neither of the link phrases in it break across line boundaries,
in either A4- or US-page-size PDF output. This fixes a reported build
failure for the 9.3beta2 A4 PDF docs, and future-proofs this particular
para against causing similar problems in future. (Perhaps somebody will
fix this issue in the SGML/TeX documentation tool chain someday, but I'm
not holding my breath.)
Back-patch to all supported branches, since the same problem could rise up
to bite us in future updates if anyone changes anything earlier than this
in func.sgml.
If there is no <date> element, the publication date for the EPUB
manifest is taken from the copyright year. But something like
"1996-2013" is not a legal date specification. So the EPUB output
currently fails epubcheck.
Put in a separate <date> element with the current year. Put it in
legal.sgml, because copyright.pl already instructs to update that
manually, so it hopefully won't be missed.
ALTER TABLE .. VALIDATE CONSTRAINT previously
gave incorrect details about lock levels and
therefore incomplete reasons to use the option.
Initial bug report and fix from Marko Tiikkaja
Reworded by me to include comments by Kevin Grittner
Extend the FDW API (which we already changed for 9.3) so that an FDW can
report whether specific foreign tables are insertable/updatable/deletable.
The default assumption continues to be that they're updatable if the
relevant executor callback function is supplied by the FDW, but finer
granularity is now possible. As a test case, add an "updatable" option to
contrib/postgres_fdw.
This patch also fixes the information_schema views, which previously did
not think that foreign tables were ever updatable, and fixes
view_is_auto_updatable() so that a view on a foreign table can be
auto-updatable.
initdb forced due to changes in information_schema views and the functions
they rely on. This is a bit unfortunate to do post-beta1, but if we don't
change this now then we'll have another API break for FDWs when we do
change it.
Dean Rasheed, somewhat editorialized on by Tom Lane
Per discussion on -hackers. We treat Unicode escapes when unescaping
them similarly to the way we treat them in PostgreSQL string literals.
Escapes in the ASCII range are always accepted, no matter what the
database encoding. Escapes for higher code points are only processed in
UTF8 databases, and attempts to process them in other databases will
result in an error. \u0000 is never unescaped, since it would result in
an impermissible null byte.
Per discussion, this restriction isn't needed for any real security reason,
and it seems to confuse people more often than it helps them. It could
also result in some database states being unrestorable. So just drop it.
Back-patch to 9.0, where ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES was introduced.
In 9.2, Unicode escape sequences are not analysed at all other than
to make sure that they are in the form \uXXXX. But in 9.3 many of the
new operators and functions try to turn JSON text values into text in
the server encoding, and this includes de-escaping Unicode escape
sequences. This processing had not taken into account the possibility
that this might contain a surrogate pair to designate a character
outside the BMP. That is now handled correctly.
This also enforces correct use of surrogate pairs, something that is not
done by the type's input routines. This fact is noted in the docs.
Although the DTD technically allows this, the resulting HTML is invalid
because it puts block elements inside inline elements. DocBook 5.0 also
doesn't allow it anymore, so it's fair to assume that this was never
really intended to work. Replace <synopsis> with <literal>, which is
the markup used elsewhere in the documentation in similar cases.
The documentation for ALTER TYPE .. RENAME claimed to support a
RESTRICT/CASCADE option at the 'type' level, which wasn't implemented
and doesn't make a whole lot of sense to begin with. What is supported,
and previously undocumented, is
ALTER TYPE .. RENAME ATTRIBUTE .. RESTRICT/CASCADE.
I've updated the documentation and back-patched this to 9.1 where it was
first introduced.
The 9.2 patch that added argument name support in SQL-language functions
missed updating a parenthetical comment about that in the CREATE FUNCTION
reference page. Noted by Erwin Brandstetter.
If a standby server has a cascading standby server connected to it, it's
possible that WAL has already been sent up to the next WAL page boundary,
splitting a WAL record in the middle, when the first standby server is
promoted. Don't throw an assertion failure or error in walsender if that
happens.
Also, fix a variant of the same bug in pg_receivexlog: if it had already
received WAL on previous timeline up to a segment boundary, when the
upstream standby server is promoted so that the timeline switch record falls
on the previous segment, pg_receivexlog would miss the segment containing
the timeline switch. To fix that, have walsender send the position of the
timeline switch at end-of-streaming, in addition to the next timeline's ID.
It was previously assumed that the switch happened exactly where the
streaming stopped.
Note: this is an incompatible change in the streaming protocol. You might
get an error if you try to stream over timeline switches, if the client is
running 9.3beta1 and the server is more recent. It should be fine after a
reconnect, however.
Reported by Fujii Masao.
What we have implemented is a radix tree (or a radix trie or a patricia
trie), but the docs and code comments incorrectly called it a "suffix tree".
Alexander Korotkov
It is surprisingly common mistake to leave out backup_label file from a base
backup. Say more explicitly that it must be included.
Jeff Janes, with minor rewording by me.
Previously this state was represented by whether the view's disk file had
zero or nonzero size, which is problematic for numerous reasons, since it's
breaking a fundamental assumption about heap storage. This was done to
allow unlogged matviews to revert to unpopulated status after a crash
despite our lack of any ability to update catalog entries post-crash.
However, this poses enough risk of future problems that it seems better to
not support unlogged matviews until we can find another way. Accordingly,
revert that choice as well as a number of existing kluges forced by it
in favor of creating a pg_class.relispopulated flag column.
The initial implementation of this feature was really unsupportable,
because it's relying on the physical size of an on-disk file to carry the
relation's populated/unpopulated state, which is at least a modularity
violation and could have serious long-term consequences. We could say that
an unlogged matview goes to empty on crash, but not everybody likes that
definition, so let's just remove the feature for 9.3. We can add it back
when we have a less klugy implementation.
I left the grammar and tab-completion support for CREATE UNLOGGED
MATERIALIZED VIEW in place, since it's harmless and allows delivering a
more specific error message about the unsupported feature.
I'm committing this separately to ease identification of what should be
reverted when/if we are able to re-enable the feature.
Restore 4-byte designation for docs. Fix 9.3 doc query to properly pad
to four digits.
Backpatch to all active branches
Per suggestions from Ian Lawrence Barwick
Previously, libpq and the backend had opposite ideas about whether
it was necessary for the client to send a CopyDone message after
receiving an ErrorResponse, making it impossible to cleanly exit
COPY BOTH mode. Fix libpq so that works correctly, adopting the
backend's notion that an ErrorResponse kills the copy in both
directions.
Adjust receivelog.c to avoid a degradation in the quality of the
resulting error messages. libpqwalreceiver.c is already doing
the right thing, so no adjustment needed there.
Add an explicit statement to the documentation explaining how
this part of the protocol is supposed to work, in the hopes of
avoiding future confusion in this area.
Since the consequences of all this confusion are very limited,
especially in the back-branches where no client ever attempts
to exit COPY BOTH mode without closing the connection entirely,
no back-patch.
This changes the behavior of the start and stop actions to exit
successfully if the server was already started or stopped.
This changes the default behavior of the start action: Before, if the
server was already running, it would print a message and succeed. Now,
that situation will result in an error. When running in idempotent
mode, no message is printed and pg_ctl exits successfully.
It was considered to just make the idempotent behavior the default and
only option, but pg_upgrade needs the old behavior.
