Tom fixed another one of these in commit 7f32dbcd, but there was another
almost identical one in libpq docs. Per his comment:
HP's web server has apparently become case-sensitive sometime recently.
Per bug #13479 from Daniel Abraham. Corrected link identified by Alvaro.
The .backup file name can be passed to pg_archivecleanup even if
it includes the extension which is specified in -x option.
However, previously the document incorrectly warned a user
not to do that.
Back-patch to 9.2 where pg_archivecleanup's -x option and
the warning were added.
- Correct the name of directory which those catalog columns allow to be shrunk.
- Correct the name of symbol which is used as the value of pg_class.relminmxid
when the relation is not a table.
- Fix "ID ID" typo.
Backpatch to 9.3 where those cataog columns were introduced.
Also sneak entries for commits 97ff2a564 et al into the sections for
the previous releases in the relevant branches. Those fixes did go out
in the previous releases, but missed getting documented.
This has been the predominant outcome. When the output of decrypting
with a wrong key coincidentally resembled an OpenPGP packet header,
pgcrypto could instead report "Corrupt data", "Not text data" or
"Unsupported compression algorithm". The distinct "Corrupt data"
message added no value. The latter two error messages misled when the
decrypted payload also exhibited fundamental integrity problems. Worse,
error message variance in other systems has enabled cryptologic attacks;
see RFC 4880 section "14. Security Considerations". Whether these
pgcrypto behaviors are likewise exploitable is unknown.
In passing, document that pgcrypto does not resist side-channel attacks.
Back-patch to 9.0 (all supported versions).
Security: CVE-2015-3167
Analysis by Noah Misch shows that the 25% threshold set by commit
53bb309d2d is lower than any other,
similar autovac threshold. While we don't know exactly what value
will be optimal for all users, it is better to err a little on the
high side than on the low side. A higher value increases the risk
that users might exhaust the available space and start seeing errors
before autovacuum can clean things up sufficiently, but a user who
hits that problem can compensate for it by reducing
autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age to a value dependent on their
average multixact size. On the flip side, if the emergency cap
imposed by that patch kicks in too early, the user will experience
excessive wraparound scanning and will be unable to mitigate that
problem by configuration. The new value will hopefully reduce the
risk of such bad experiences while still providing enough headroom
to avoid multixact member exhaustion for most users.
Along the way, adjust the documentation to reflect the effects of
commit 04e6d3b877, which taught
autovacuum to run for multixact wraparound even when autovacuum
is configured off.
As discussed, the default setting of include_realm=0 can be dangerous in
multi-realm environments because it is then impossible to differentiate
users with the same username but who are from two different realms.
Recommend include_realm=1 and note that the default setting may change
in a future version of PostgreSQL and therefore users may wish to
explicitly set include_realm to avoid issues while upgrading.
The logic introduced in commit b69bf30b9b
and repaired in commits 669c7d20e6 and
7be47c56af helps to ensure that we don't
overwrite old multixact member information while it is still needed,
but a user who creates many large multixacts can still exhaust the
member space (and thus start getting errors) while autovacuum stands
idly by.
To fix this, progressively ramp down the effective value (but not the
actual contents) of autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age as member space
utilization increases. This makes autovacuum more aggressive and also
reduces the threshold for a manual VACUUM to perform a full-table scan.
This patch leaves unsolved the problem of ensuring that emergency
autovacuums are triggered even when autovacuum=off. We'll need to fix
that via a separate patch.
Thomas Munro and Robert Haas
psql was already accepting conninfo strings as the first parameter in
\connect, but the way it worked wasn't sane; some of the other
parameters would get the previous connection's values, causing it to
connect to a completely unexpected server or, more likely, not finding
any server at all because of completely wrong combinations of
parameters.
Fix by explicitely checking for a conninfo-looking parameter in the
dbname position; if one is found, use its complete specification rather
than mix with the other arguments. Also, change tab-completion to not
try to complete conninfo/URI-looking "dbnames" and document that
conninfos are accepted as first argument.
There was a weak consensus to backpatch this, because while the behavior
of using the dbname as a conninfo is nowhere documented for \connect, it
is reasonable to expect that it works because it does work in many other
contexts. Therefore this is backpatched all the way back to 9.0.
To implement this, routines previously private to libpq have been
duplicated so that psql can decide what looks like a conninfo/URI
string. In back branches, just duplicate the same code all the way back
to 9.2, where URIs where introduced; 9.0 and 9.1 have a simpler version.
In master, the routines are moved to src/common and renamed.
Author: David Fetter, Andrew Dunstan. Some editorialization by me
(probably earning a Gierth's "Sloppy" badge in the process.)
Reviewers: Andrew Gierth, Erik Rijkers, Pavel Stěhule, Stephen Frost,
Robert Haas, Andrew Dunstan.
You're required to write either RANGE or ROWS to start a frame clause,
but the documentation incorrectly implied this is optional. Noted by
David Johnston.
The SGML docs claimed that 1-byte integers could be sent or received with
the "isint" options, but no such behavior has ever been implemented in
pqGetInt() or pqPutInt(). The in-code documentation header for PQfn() was
even less in tune with reality, and the code itself used parameter names
matching neither the SGML docs nor its libpq-fe.h declaration. Do a bit
of additional wordsmithing on the SGML docs while at it.
Since the business about 1-byte integers is a clear documentation bug,
back-patch to all supported branches.
Since 9.1, we've provided extensions with a way to denote
"configuration" tables- tables created by an extension which the user
may modify. By marking these as "configuration" tables, the extension
is asking for the data in these tables to be pg_dump'd (tables which
are not marked in this way are assumed to be entirely handled during
CREATE EXTENSION and are not included at all in a pg_dump).
Unfortunately, pg_dump neglected to consider foreign key relationships
between extension configuration tables and therefore could end up
trying to reload the data in an order which would cause FK violations.
This patch teaches pg_dump about these dependencies, so that the data
dumped out is done so in the best order possible. Note that there's no
way to handle circular dependencies, but those have yet to be seen in
the wild.
The release notes for this should include a caution to users that
existing pg_dump-based backups may be invalid due to this issue. The
data is all there, but restoring from it will require extracting the
data for the configuration tables and then loading them in the correct
order by hand.
Discussed initially back in bug #6738, more recently brought up by
Gilles Darold, who provided an initial patch which was further reworked
by Michael Paquier. Further modifications and documentation updates
by me.
Back-patch to 9.1 where we added the concept of extension configuration
tables.
If libpq output buffer is full, pqSendSome() function tries to drain any
incoming data. This avoids deadlock, if the server e.g. sends a lot of
NOTICE messages, and blocks until we read them. However, pqSendSome() only
did that in blocking mode. In non-blocking mode, the deadlock could still
happen.
To fix, take a two-pronged approach:
1. Change the documentation to instruct that when PQflush() returns 1, you
should wait for both read- and write-ready, and call PQconsumeInput() if it
becomes read-ready. That fixes the deadlock, but applications are not going
to change overnight.
2. In pqSendSome(), drain the input buffer before returning 1. This
alleviates the problem for applications that only wait for write-ready. In
particular, a slow but steady stream of NOTICE messages during COPY FROM
STDIN will no longer cause a deadlock. The risk remains that the server
attempts to send a large burst of data and fills its output buffer, and at
the same time the client also sends enough data to fill its output buffer.
The application will deadlock if it goes to sleep, waiting for the socket
to become write-ready, before the server's data arrives. In practice,
NOTICE messages and such that the server might be sending are usually
short, so it's highly unlikely that the server would fill its output buffer
so quickly.
Backpatch to all supported versions.
In investigating yesterday's crash report from Hugo Osvaldo Barrera, I only
looked back as far as commit f3aec2c7f5 where the breakage occurred
(which is why I thought the IPv4-in-IPv6 business was undocumented). But
actually the logic dates back to commit 3c9bb8886d and was simply
broken by erroneous refactoring in the later commit. A bit of archives
excavation shows that we added the whole business in response to a report
that some 2003-era Linux kernels would report IPv4 connections as having
IPv4-in-IPv6 addresses. The fact that we've had no complaints since 9.0
seems to be sufficient confirmation that no modern kernels do that, so
let's just rip it all out rather than trying to fix it.
Do this in the back branches too, thus essentially deciding that our
effective behavior since 9.0 is correct. If there are any platforms on
which the kernel reports IPv4-in-IPv6 addresses as such, yesterday's fix
would have made for a subtle and potentially security-sensitive change in
the effective meaning of IPv4 pg_hba.conf entries, which does not seem like
a good thing to do in minor releases. So let's let the post-9.0 behavior
stand, and change the documentation to match it.
In passing, I failed to resist the temptation to wordsmith the description
of pg_hba.conf IPv4 and IPv6 address entries a bit. A lot of this text
hasn't been touched since we were IPv4-only.
When ecpg was rewritten to the new protocol version not all variable types
were corrected. This patch rewrites the code for these types to fix that. It
also fixes the documentation to correctly tell the status of array handling.
When beginning streaming replication, the client usually issues the
IDENTIFY_SYSTEM command, which used to return the current WAL insert
position. That's not suitable for the intended purpose of that field,
however. pg_receivexlog uses it to start replication from the reported
point, but if it hasn't been flushed to disk yet, it will fail. Change
IDENTIFY_SYSTEM to report the flush position instead.
Backpatch to 9.1 and above. 9.0 doesn't report any WAL position.
The previous wording claimed that the file was always in /etc, but of
course this varies with the installation layout. Write instead that it
can be found via `pg_config --sysconfdir`. Even though this is still
somewhat incorrect because it doesn't account of moved installations, it
at least conveys that the location depends on the installation.
"ECHO all" is ignored for interactive input, and has been for a very long
time, though possibly not for as long as the documentation has claimed the
opposite. Fix that, and also note that empty lines aren't echoed, which
while dubious is another longstanding behavior (it's embedded in our
regression test files for one thing). Per bug #12721 from Hans Ginzel.
In HEAD, also improve the code comments in this area, and suppress an
unnecessary fflush(stdout) when we're not echoing. That would likely
be safe to back-patch, but I'll not risk it mere hours before a release
wrap.
Move random() and setseed() to a separate table, to have them grouped
together. Also add a notice that random() is not cryptographically secure.
Back-patch of commit 75fdcec145 into
all supported versions, per discussion of the need to document that
random() is just a wrapper around random(3).
Use the phraseology "ISO 8601 week-numbering year" in place of just
"ISO year", and make related adjustments to other terminology.
The point of this change is that it seems some people see "ISO year"
and think "standard year", whereupon they're surprised when constructs
like to_char(..., "IYYY-MM-DD") produce nonsensical results. Perhaps
hanging a few more adjectives on it will discourage them from jumping
to false conclusions. I put in an explicit warning against that
specific usage, too, though the main point is to discourage people
who haven't read this far down the page.
In passing fix some nearby markup and terminology inconsistencies.
For simple boolean variables such as ON_ERROR_STOP, psql has for a long
time recognized variant spellings of "on" and "off" (such as "1"/"0"),
and it also made a point of warning you if you'd misspelled the setting.
But these conveniences did not exist for other keyword-valued variables.
In particular, though ECHO_HIDDEN and ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK include "on" and
"off" as possible values, none of the alternative spellings for those were
recognized; and to make matters worse the code would just silently assume
"on" was meant for any unrecognized spelling. Several people have reported
getting bitten by this, so let's fix it. In detail, this patch:
* Allows all spellings recognized by ParseVariableBool() for ECHO_HIDDEN
and ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK.
* Reports a warning for unrecognized values for COMP_KEYWORD_CASE, ECHO,
ECHO_HIDDEN, HISTCONTROL, ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK, and VERBOSITY.
* Recognizes all values for all these variables case-insensitively;
previously there was a mishmash of case-sensitive and case-insensitive
behaviors.
Back-patch to all supported branches. There is a small risk of breaking
existing scripts that were accidentally failing to malfunction; but the
consensus is that the chance of detecting real problems and preventing
future mistakes outweighs this.
Document the long forms of \H \i \ir \o \p \r \w ... apparently, we have
a long and dishonorable history of leaving out the unabbreviated names of
psql backslash commands.
Avoid saying "Unix shell"; we can just say "shell" with equal clarity,
and not leave Windows users wondering whether the feature works for them.
Improve consistency of documentation of \g \o \w metacommands. There's
no reason to use slightly different wording or markup for each one.
json_agg was originally designed to aggregate records. However, it soon
became clear that it is useful for aggregating all kinds of values and
that's what we have on 9.3 and 9.4, and in head for it and jsonb_agg.
The documentation suggested otherwise, so this fixes it.
Explain that you have to use "VARIADIC ARRAY[]" to pass an empty array
to a variadic parameter position. This was already implicit in the text
but it seems better to spell it out.
Per a suggestion from David Johnston, though I didn't use his proposed
wording. Back-patch to all supported branches.
The possibility that constant subexpressions of a CASE might be evaluated
at planning time was touched on in 9.17.1 (CASE expressions), but it really
ought to be explained in 4.2.14 (Expression Evaluation Rules) which is the
primary discussion of such topics. Add text and an example there, and
revise the <note> under CASE to link there.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since it's acted like this for a
long time (though 9.2+ is probably worse because of its more aggressive
use of constant-folding via replanning of nominally-prepared statements).
Pre-9.4, also back-patch text added in commit 0ce627d4 about CASE versus
aggregate functions.
Tom Lane and David Johnston, per discussion of bug #12273.
Use SSPI authentication to allow connections exclusively from the OS
user that launched the test suite. This closes on Windows the
vulnerability that commit be76a6d39e
closed on other platforms. Users of "make installcheck" or custom test
harnesses can run "pg_regress --config-auth=DATADIR" to activate the
same authentication configuration that "make check" would use.
Back-patch to 9.0 (all supported versions).
Security: CVE-2014-0067
If the "dbname" attribute in PQconnectDBParams contained a connection string
or URI (and expand_dbname = TRUE), the database name from the connection
string could not be overridden by a subsequent "dbname" keyword in the
array. That was not intentional; all other options can be overridden.
Furthermore, any subsequent "dbname" caused the connection string from the
first dbname value to be processed again, overriding any values for the same
options that were given between the connection string and the second dbname
option.
In the passing, clarify in the docs that only the first dbname option in the
array is parsed as a connection string.
Alex Shulgin. Backpatch to all supported versions.
In bug #12000, Andreas Kunert complained that the documentation was
misleading in saying "FROM T1 CROSS JOIN T2 is equivalent to FROM T1, T2".
That's correct as far as it goes, but the equivalence doesn't hold when
you consider three or more tables, since JOIN binds more tightly than
comma. I added a <note> to explain this, and ended up rearranging some
of the existing text so that the note would make sense in context.
In passing, rewrite the description of JOIN USING, which was unnecessarily
vague, and hadn't been helped any by somebody's reliance on markup as a
substitute for clear writing. (Mostly this involved reintroducing a
concrete example that was unaccountably removed by commit 032f3b7e166cfa28.)
Back-patch to all supported branches.
pgp_sym_encrypt's option is spelled "sess-key", not "enable-session-key".
Spotted by Jeff Janes.
In passing, improve a comment in pgp-pgsql.c to make it clearer that
the debugging options are intentionally undocumented.
Up to now, PG has assumed that any given timezone abbreviation (such as
"EDT") represents a constant GMT offset in the usage of any particular
region; we had a way to configure what that offset was, but not for it
to be changeable over time. But, as with most things horological, this
view of the world is too simplistic: there are numerous regions that have
at one time or another switched to a different GMT offset but kept using
the same timezone abbreviation. Almost the entire Russian Federation did
that a few years ago, and later this month they're going to do it again.
And there are similar examples all over the world.
To cope with this, invent the notion of a "dynamic timezone abbreviation",
which is one that is referenced to a particular underlying timezone
(as defined in the IANA timezone database) and means whatever it currently
means in that zone. For zones that use or have used daylight-savings time,
the standard and DST abbreviations continue to have the property that you
can specify standard or DST time and get that time offset whether or not
DST was theoretically in effect at the time. However, the abbreviations
mean what they meant at the time in question (or most recently before that
time) rather than being absolutely fixed.
The standard abbreviation-list files have been changed to use this behavior
for abbreviations that have actually varied in meaning since 1970. The
old simple-numeric definitions are kept for abbreviations that have not
changed, since they are a bit faster to resolve.
While this is clearly a new feature, it seems necessary to back-patch it
into all active branches, because otherwise use of Russian zone
abbreviations is going to become even more problematic than it already was.
This change supersedes the changes in commit 513d06ded et al to modify the
fixed meanings of the Russian abbreviations; since we've not shipped that
yet, this will avoid an undesirably incompatible (not to mention incorrect)
change in behavior for timestamps between 2011 and 2014.
This patch makes some cosmetic changes in ecpglib to keep its usage of
datetime lookup tables as similar as possible to the backend code, but
doesn't do anything about the increasingly obsolete set of timezone
abbreviation definitions that are hard-wired into ecpglib. Whatever we
do about that will likely not be appropriate material for back-patching.
Also, a potential free() of a garbage pointer after an out-of-memory
failure in ecpglib has been fixed.
This patch also fixes pre-existing bugs in DetermineTimeZoneOffset() that
caused it to produce unexpected results near a timezone transition, if
both the "before" and "after" states are marked as standard time. We'd
only ever thought about or tested transitions between standard and DST
time, but that's not what's happening when a zone simply redefines their
base GMT offset.
In passing, update the SGML documentation to refer to the Olson/zoneinfo/
zic timezone database as the "IANA" database, since it's now being
maintained under the auspices of IANA.
When there are cost-delay-related storage options set for a table,
trying to make that table participate in the autovacuum cost-limit
balancing algorithm produces undesirable results: instead of using the
configured values, the global values are always used,
as illustrated by Mark Kirkwood in
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/52FACF15.8020507@catalyst.net.nz
Since the mechanism is already complicated, just disable it for those
cases rather than trying to make it cope. There are undesirable
side-effects from this too, namely that the total I/O impact on the
system will be higher whenever such tables are vacuumed. However, this
is seen as less harmful than slowing down vacuum, because that would
cause bloat to accumulate. Anyway, in the new system it is possible to
tweak options to get the precise behavior one wants, whereas with the
previous system one was simply hosed.
This has been broken forever, so backpatch to all supported branches.
This might affect systems where cost_limit and cost_delay have been set
for individual tables.
The COPY documentation incorrectly stated, for the PROGRAM case,
that we read from stdin and wrote to stdout. Fix that, and improve
consistency by referring to the 'PostgreSQL' user instead of the
'postgres' user, as is done in the rest of the COPY documentation.
Pointed out by Peter van Dijk.
Back-patch to 9.3 where COPY .. PROGRAM was introduced.
This has been broken since commit af7914c662,
which added the EXPLAIN (TIMING) option. Although that commit included
updates to auto_explain, they evidently weren't tested very carefully,
because the code failed to print node timings even when it should, due to
failure to set es.timing in the ExplainState struct. Reported off-list by
Neelakanth Nadgir of Salesforce.
In passing, clean up the documentation for auto_explain's options a
little bit, including re-ordering them into what seems to me a more
logical order.
The documentation used to suggest setting this parameter with ALTER ROLE
SET, but that never worked, so replace it with a working suggestion.
Reported-by: Kyotaro Horiguchi <horiguchi.kyotaro@lab.ntt.co.jp>
psql's \s (print command history) doesn't work at all with recent libedit
versions when printing to the terminal, because libedit tries to do an
fchmod() on the target file which will fail if the target is /dev/tty.
(We'd already noted this in the context of the target being /dev/null.)
Even before that, it didn't work pleasantly, because libedit likes to
encode the command history file (to ensure successful reloading), which
renders it nigh unreadable, not to mention significantly different-looking
depending on exactly which libedit version you have. So let's forget using
write_history() for this purpose, and instead print the data ourselves,
using logic similar to that used to iterate over the history for newline
encoding/decoding purposes.
While we're at it, insert the ability to use the pager when \s is printing
to the terminal. This has been an acknowledged shortcoming of \s for many
years, so while you could argue it's not exactly a back-patchable bug fix
it still seems like a good improvement. Anyone who's seriously annoyed
at this can use "\s /dev/tty" or local equivalent to get the old behavior.
Experimentation with this showed that the history iteration logic was
actually rather broken when used with libedit. It turns out that with
libedit you have to use previous_history() not next_history() to advance
to more recent history entries. The easiest and most robust fix for this
seems to be to make a run-time test to verify which function to call.
We had not noticed this because libedit doesn't really need the newline
encoding logic: its own encoding ensures that command entries containing
newlines are reloaded correctly (unlike libreadline). So the effective
behavior with recent libedits was that only the oldest history entry got
newline-encoded or newline-decoded. However, because of yet other bugs in
history_set_pos(), some old versions of libedit allowed the existing loop
logic to reach entries besides the oldest, which means there may be libedit
~/.psql_history files out there containing encoded newlines in more than
just the oldest entry. To ensure we can reload such files, it seems
appropriate to back-patch this fix, even though that will result in some
incompatibility with older psql versions (ie, multiline history entries
written by a psql with this fix will look corrupted to a psql without it,
if its libedit is reasonably up to date).
Stepan Rutz and Tom Lane
The old claim is from my commit d06ebdb8d3 of
2000-07-17, but it seems to have been a plain old thinko; sum(float4) has
been distinct from sum(float8) since Berkeley days. Noted by KaiGai Kohei.
While at it, mention the existence of sum(money), which is also of
embarrassingly ancient vintage.
Errors detected using Topy (https://github.com/intgr/topy), all
changes verified by hand and some manual tweaks added.
Marti Raudsepp
Individual changes backpatched, where applicable, as far as 9.0.
The old text explained what happened if we didn't have working int64
arithmetic. Since that case has been explicitly rejected by configure
since 8.4.3, documenting it in the 9.x branches can only produce confusion.
FreeBSD hasn't made any use of kern.ipc.semmap since 1.1, and newer
releases reject attempts to set it altogether; so stop recommending
that it be adjusted. Per bug #11161.
Back-patch to all supported branches. Before 9.3, also incorporate
commit 7a42dff47, which touches the same text and for some reason
was not back-patched at the time.
Specifically this commit updates forkname_to_number() so that the HINT
message includes "init" fork, and also adds the description of "init" fork
into pg_relation_size() document.
This is a part of the commit 2d00190495
which has fixed the same oversight in master and 9.4. Back-patch to
9.1 where "init" fork was added.
The initialization fork was added in 9.1, but has not been taken into
consideration in documents of get_raw_page function in pageinspect and
storage layout. This commit fixes those oversights.
get_raw_page can read not only a table but also an index, etc. So it
should be documented that the function can read any relation. This commit
also fixes the document of pageinspect that way.
Back-patch to 9.1 where those oversights existed.
Vik Fearing, review by MauMau
The user documentation was vague and not entirely accurate about how
we treat domain inputs for ambiguous operators/functions. Clarify
that, and add an example and some commentary. Per a recent question
from Adam Mackler.
It's acted like this ever since we added domains, so back-patch
to all supported branches.
Break the list of available options into an <itemizedlist> instead of
inline sentences. This is mostly motivated by wanting to ensure that the
cross-references to the FSM and VM docs don't cross page boundaries in PDF
format; but it seems to me to read more easily this way anyway. I took the
liberty of editorializing a bit further while at it.
Per complaint from Magnus about 9.0.18 docs not building in A4 format.
Patch all active branches so we don't get blind-sided by this particular
issue again in future.
~/.pgpass is a sound choice everywhere, and "peer" authentication is
safe on every platform it supports. Cease to recommend "trust"
authentication, the safety of which is deeply configuration-specific.
Back-patch to 9.0, where pg_upgrade was introduced.
7380b63 changed log_filename so that epoch was not appended to it
when no format specifier is given. But the example of CSV log file name
with epoch still left in log_filename document. This commit removes
such obsolete example.
This commit also documents the defaults of log_directory and
log_filename.
Backpatch to all supported versions.
Christoph Berg
By using curly braces, the template had specified that one of
"NOT DEFERRABLE", "INITIALLY IMMEDIATE", or "INITIALLY DEFERRED"
was required on any CREATE TRIGGER statement, which is not
accurate. Change to square brackets makes that optional.
Backpatch to 9.1, where the error was introduced.
Any OS user able to access the socket can connect as the bootstrap
superuser and proceed to execute arbitrary code as the OS user running
the test. Protect against that by placing the socket in a temporary,
mode-0700 subdirectory of /tmp. The pg_regress-based test suites and
the pg_upgrade test suite were vulnerable; the $(prove_check)-based test
suites were already secure. Back-patch to 8.4 (all supported versions).
The hazard remains wherever the temporary cluster accepts TCP
connections, notably on Windows.
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
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.
