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 8457d0beca731bf0 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 a5ec86a7c787832d28d5e50400ec96a5190f2555 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.
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 a2dabf0e1dda93c8: 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
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
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.
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.
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.
Previously it was documented that the details on HeapTupleHeaderData
struct could be found in htup.h. This is not correct because it's now
defined in htup_details.h.
Back-patch to 9.3 where the definition of HeapTupleHeaderData struct
was moved from htup.h to htup_details.h.
Michael Paquier
With the arrival of the CUBE key word/feature, the index entries for the
cube extension and the CUBE feature were collapsed into one. Tweak the
entry for the cube extension so they are separate entries.
Every query of a single ENABLE ROW SECURITY table has two meanings, with
the row_security GUC selecting between them. With row_security=force
available, every function author would have been advised to either set
the GUC locally or test both meanings. Non-compliance would have
threatened reliability and, for SECURITY DEFINER functions, security.
Authors already face an obligation to account for search_path, and we
should not mimic that example. With this change, only BYPASSRLS roles
need exercise the aforementioned care. Back-patch to 9.5, where the
row_security GUC was introduced.
Since this narrows the domain of pg_db_role_setting.setconfig and
pg_proc.proconfig, one might bump catversion. A row_security=force
setting in one of those columns will elicit a clear message, so don't.
The docs claimed that \uhhhh would be interpreted as a Unicode value
regardless of the database encoding, but it's never been implemented
that way: \uhhhh and \xhhhh actually mean exactly the same thing, namely
the character that pg_mb2wchar translates to 0xhhhh. Moreover we were
falsely dismissive of the usefulness of Unicode code points above FFFF.
Fix that.
It's been like this for ages, so back-patch to all supported branches.
COMMENT supports POLICY but the documentation hadn't caught up with
that fact.
Patch by Charles Clavadetscher
Back-patch to 9.5 where POLICY was added.
