That was written when we still had "crypt" authentication, and it was
referring to the fact that an older client might support "crypt"
authentication but not "md5". But we haven't supported "crypt" for years.
(As soon as we add a new authentication mechanism that doesn't work with
MD5 hashes, we'll need a similar notice again. But this text as it's worded
now is just wrong.)
Backpatch to all supported versions.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/9a7263eb-0980-2072-4424-440bb2513dc7@iki.fi
In addition to space accounted for by tuple_len, dead_tuple_len and
free_space, the table_len includes page overhead, the item pointers
table and padding bytes.
Backpatch to live branches.
We had an index entry for "median" attached to the percentile_cont function
entry, which was pretty useless because a person following the link would
never realize that that function was the one they were being hinted to use.
Instead, make the index entry point at the example in syntax-aggregates,
and add a <seealso> link to "percentile".
Also, since that example explicitly claims to be calculating the median,
make it use percentile_cont not percentile_disc. This makes no difference
in terms of the larger goals of that section, but so far as I can find,
nearly everyone thinks that "median" means the continuous not discrete
calculation.
Per gripe from Steven Winfield. Back-patch to 9.4 where we introduced
percentile_cont.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161223102056.25614.1166@wrigleys.postgresql.org
The ALTER TABLE documentation wasn't terribly clear when it came to
which commands could be combined together and what it meant when they
were.
In particular, SET TABLESPACE *can* be combined with other commands,
when it's operating against a single table, but not when multiple tables
are being moved with ALL IN TABLESPACE. Further, the actions are
applied together but not really in 'parallel', at least today.
Pointed out by: Amit Langote
Improved wording from Tom.
Back-patch to 9.4, where the ALL IN TABLESPACE option was added.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/14c535b4-13ef-0590-1b98-76af355a0763%40lab.ntt.co.jp
When there is both a serialization failure and a unique violation,
throw the former rather than the latter. When initially pushed,
this was viewed as a feature to assist application framework
developers, so that they could more accurately determine when to
retry a failed transaction, but a test case presented by Ian
Jackson has shown that this patch can prevent serialization
anomalies in some cases where a unique violation is caught within a
subtransaction, the work of that subtransaction is discarded, and
no error is thrown. That makes this a bug fix, so it is being
back-patched to all supported branches where it is not already
present (i.e., 9.2 to 9.5).
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1481307991-16971-1-git-send-email-ian.jackson@eu.citrix.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/22607.56276.807567.924144@mariner.uk.xensource.com
If the PAGER environment variable is set but contains an empty string,
psql would pass it to "sh" which would silently exit, causing whatever
query output we were printing to vanish entirely. This is quite
mystifying; it took a long time for us to figure out that this was the
cause of Joseph Brenner's trouble report. Rather than allowing that
to happen, we should treat this as another way to specify "no pager".
(We could alternatively treat it as selecting the default pager, but
it seems more likely that the former is what the user meant to achieve
by setting PAGER this way.)
Nonempty, but all-white-space, PAGER values have the same behavior, and
it's pretty easy to test for that, so let's handle that case the same way.
Most other cases of faulty PAGER values will result in the shell printing
some kind of complaint to stderr, which should be enough to diagnose the
problem, so we don't need to work harder than this. (Note that there's
been an intentional decision not to be very chatty about apparent failure
returns from the pager process, since that may happen if, eg, the user
quits the pager with control-C or some such. I'd just as soon not start
splitting hairs about which exit codes might merit making our own report.)
libpq's old PQprint() function was already on board with ignoring empty
PAGER values, but for consistency, make it ignore all-white-space values
as well.
It's been like this a long time, so back-patch to all supported branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFfgvXWLOE2novHzYjmQK8-J6TmHz42G8f3X0SORM44+stUGmw@mail.gmail.com
Per bug #14441 from Mark Pether, the documentation could be misread,
mainly because some of the examples failed to show what happens with
a multicharacter "characters to trim" string. Also, while the text
description in most of these entries was fairly clear that the
"characters" argument is a set of characters not a substring to match,
some of them used variant wording that was a bit less clear.
trim() itself suffered from both deficiencies and was thus pretty
misinterpretable.
Also fix failure to explain which of LEADING/TRAILING/BOTH is the
default.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161130011710.6539.53657@wrigleys.postgresql.org
The documentation around the -b/--blobs option to pg_dump seemed to
imply that it might be possible to add blobs to a "schema-only" dump or
similar. Clarify that blobs are data and therefore will only be
included in dumps where data is being included, even when -b is used to
request blobs be included.
The -b option has been around since before 9.2, so back-patch to all
supported branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161119173316.GA13284@tamriel.snowman.net
Create a section specifically for the syntactic rules around whole-row
variable usage, such as expansion of "foo.*". This was previously
documented only haphazardly, with some critical info buried in
unexpected places like xfunc-sql-composite-functions. Per repeated
questions in different mailing lists.
Discussion: <16288.1479610770@sss.pgh.pa.us>
There are assorted references to RETURNING in Part II, but nothing
that would qualify as an explanation of the feature, which seems
like an oversight considering how useful it is. Add something.
Noted while looking for a place to point a cross-reference to ...
Commit 3c4cf080879b should have removed SET TABLESPACE from the synopsis
of ALTER MATERIALIZE VIEW as a possible "action" when it added a
separate line for it in the main command listing, but failed to.
Repair.
Backpatch to 9.4, like the aforementioned commit.
For a very long time, pltcl's spi_exec and spi_execp commands have had
a behavior of storing the current row number as an element of output
arrays, but this was never documented. Fix that.
For an equally long time, pltcl_trigger_handler had a behavior of silently
ignoring ".tupno" as an output column name, evidently so that the result
of spi_exec could be used directly as a trigger result tuple. Not sure
how useful that really is, but in any case it's bad that it would break
attempts to use ".tupno" as an actual column name. We can fix it by not
checking for ".tupno" until after we check for a column name match. This
comports with the effective behavior of spi_exec[p] that ".tupno" is only
magic when you don't have an actual column named that.
In passing, wordsmith the description of returning modified tuples from
a pltcl trigger.
Noted while working on Jim Nasby's patch to support composite results
from pltcl. The inability to return trigger tuples using ".tupno" as
a column name is a bug, so back-patch to all supported branches.
Show how to get the system's huge page size, rather than misleadingly
referring to PAGE_SIZE (which is usually understood to be the regular
page size). Show how to confirm whether huge pages have been allocated.
Minor wordsmithing. Back-patch to 9.4 where this section appeared.
Replace "Full path to ..." with "Full path name of ...". At least one
user has misinterpreted the existing wording as meaning "Directory
containing ...".
It was perhaps not entirely clear that internal self-references shouldn't
be schema-qualified even if the view name is written with a schema.
Spell it out.
Discussion: <871sznz69m.fsf@metapensiero.it>
Evidently an oversight in commit 729205571. Back-patch to 9.2 where
privileges for types were introduced.
Report: <20160922173517.8214.88959@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
These worked as-is until around 7.0, but fail in newer versions because
there are more operators named "#". Besides it's a bit inconsistent that
only two of the examples on this page lack type names on their constants.
Report: <20160923081530.1517.75670@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Mostly, explain how row xmin's used to be replaced by FrozenTransactionId
and no longer are. Do a little copy-editing on the side.
Per discussion with Egor Rogov. Back-patch to 9.4 where the behavioral
change occurred.
Discussion: <575D7955.6060209@postgrespro.ru>
Previously, we threw an error if a dynamic timezone abbreviation did not
match any abbreviation recorded in the referenced IANA time zone entry.
That seemed like a good consistency check at the time, but it turns out
that a number of the abbreviations in the IANA database are things that
Olson and crew made up out of whole cloth. Their current policy is to
remove such names in favor of using simple numeric offsets. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, a lot of these made-up abbreviations have varied in meaning
over time, which meant that our commit b2cbced9e and later changes made
them into dynamic abbreviations. So with newer IANA database versions
that don't mention these abbreviations at all, we fail, as reported in bug
#14307 from Neil Anderson. It's worse than just a few unused-in-the-wild
abbreviations not working, because the pg_timezone_abbrevs view stops
working altogether (since its underlying function tries to compute the
whole view result in one call).
We considered deleting these abbreviations from our abbreviations list, but
the problem with that is that we can't stay ahead of possible future IANA
changes. Instead, let's leave the abbreviations list alone, and treat any
"orphaned" dynamic abbreviation as just meaning the referenced time zone.
It will behave a bit differently than it used to, in that you can't any
longer override the zone's standard vs. daylight rule by using the "wrong"
abbreviation of a pair, but that's better than failing entirely. (Also,
this solution can be interpreted as adding a small new feature, which is
that any abbreviation a user wants can be defined as referencing a time
zone name.)
Back-patch to all supported branches, since this problem affects all
of them when using tzdata 2016f or newer.
Report: <20160902031551.15674.67337@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Discussion: <6189.1472820913@sss.pgh.pa.us>
The decision to reuse values of parameters from a previous connection
has been based on whether the new target is a conninfo string. Add this
means of overriding that default. This feature arose as one component
of a fix for security vulnerabilities in pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and
pg_upgrade, so back-patch to 9.1 (all supported versions). In 9.3 and
later, comment paragraphs that required update had already-incorrect
claims about behavior when no connection is open; fix those problems.
Security: CVE-2016-5424
If ANALYZE found no repeated non-null entries in its sample, it set the
column's stadistinct value to -1.0, intending to indicate that the entries
are all distinct. But what this value actually means is that the number
of distinct values is 100% of the table's rowcount, and thus it was
overestimating the number of distinct values by however many nulls there
are. This could lead to very poor selectivity estimates, as for example
in a recent report from Andreas Joseph Krogh. We should discount the
stadistinct value by whatever we've estimated the nulls fraction to be.
(That is what will happen if we choose to use a negative stadistinct for
a column that does have repeated entries, so this code path was just
inconsistent.)
In addition to fixing the stadistinct entries stored by several different
ANALYZE code paths, adjust the logic where get_variable_numdistinct()
forces an "all distinct" estimate on the basis of finding a relevant unique
index. Unique indexes don't reject nulls, so there's no reason to assume
that the null fraction doesn't apply.
Back-patch to all supported branches. Back-patching is a bit of a judgment
call, but this problem seems to affect only a few users (else we'd have
identified it long ago), and it's bad enough when it does happen that
destabilizing plan choices in a worse direction seems unlikely.
Patch by me, with documentation wording suggested by Dean Rasheed
Report: <VisenaEmail.26.df42f82acae38a58.156463942b8@tc7-visena>
Discussion: <16143.1470350371@sss.pgh.pa.us>
The help message for pg_basebackup specifies that the numbers 0 through 9
are accepted as valid values of -Z option. But, previously -Z 0 was rejected
as an invalid compression level.
Per discussion, it's better to make pg_basebackup treat 0 as valid
compression level meaning no compression, like pg_dump.
Back-patch to all supported versions.
Reported-By: Jeff Janes
Reviewed-By: Amit Kapila
Discussion: CAMkU=1x+GwjSayc57v6w87ij6iRGFWt=hVfM0B64b1_bPVKRqg@mail.gmail.com
This text was added by commit ff213239c, and not long thereafter obsoleted
by commit 4adc2f72a (which made the test depend on NBuffers instead); but
nobody noticed the need for an update. Commit 9563d5b5e adds some further
dependency on maintenance_work_mem, but the existing verbiage seems to
cover that with about as much precision as we really want here. Let's
just take it all out rather than leaving ourselves open to more errors of
omission in future. (That solution makes this change back-patchable, too.)
Noted by Peter Geoghegan.
Discussion: <CAM3SWZRVANbj9GA9j40fAwheQCZQtSwqTN1GBTVwRrRbmSf7cg@mail.gmail.com>
The docs failed to explain that LIKE INCLUDING INDEXES would not preserve
the names of indexes and associated constraints. Also, it wasn't mentioned
that EXCLUDE constraints would be copied by this option. The latter
oversight seems enough of a documentation bug to justify back-patching.
In passing, do some minor copy-editing in the same area, and add an entry
for LIKE under "Compatibility", since it's not exactly a faithful
implementation of the standard's feature.
Discussion: <20160728151154.AABE64016B@smtp.hushmail.com>
The description of udt_privileges view contained an incorrect copy-pasted word.
Back-patch to 9.2 where udt_privileges view was added.
Author: Alexander Law
The SQL standard appears to specify that IS [NOT] NULL's tests of field
nullness are non-recursive, ie, we shouldn't consider that a composite
field with value ROW(NULL,NULL) is null for this purpose.
ExecEvalNullTest got this right, but eval_const_expressions did not,
leading to weird inconsistencies depending on whether the expression
was such that the planner could apply constant folding.
Also, adjust the docs to mention that IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM NULL can be
used as a substitute test if a simple null check is wanted for a rowtype
argument. That motivated reordering things so that IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM
is described before IS [NOT] NULL. In HEAD, I went a bit further and added
a table showing all the comparison-related predicates.
Per bug #14235. Back-patch to all supported branches, since it's certainly
undesirable that constant-folding should change the semantics.
Report and patch by Andrew Gierth; assorted wordsmithing and revised
regression test cases by me.
Report: <20160708024746.1410.57282@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
9.4 added a second description of GET DIAGNOSTICS that was totally
independent of the existing one, resulting in each description lying to the
extent that it claimed the set of status items it described was complete.
Fix that, and do some minor markup improvement.
Also some other small fixes per bug #14258 from Dilian Palauzov.
Discussion: <20160718181437.1414.40802@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Document that index storage is dependent on the operating system's
collation library ordering, and any change in that ordering can create
invalid indexes.
Discussion: 20160617154311.GB19359@momjian.us
Backpatch-through: 9.1
If there's anyplace in our SGML docs that explains this behavior, I can't
find it right at the moment. Add an explanation in "Dependency Tracking"
which seems like the authoritative place for such a discussion. Per
gripe from Michelle Schwan.
While at it, update this section's example of a dependency-related
error message: they last looked like that in 8.3. And remove the
explanation of dependency updates from pre-7.3 installations, which
is probably no longer worth anybody's brain cells to read.
The bogus error message example seems like an actual documentation bug,
so back-patch to all supported branches.
Discussion: <20160620160047.5792.49827@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Dilian Palauzov pointed out in bug #14201 that the docs failed to mention
the possibility of %R producing '(' due to an unmatched parenthesis.
He proposed just adding that in the same style as the other options were
listed; but it seemed to me that the sentence was already nearly
unintelligible, so I rewrote it a bit more extensively.
Report: <20160619121113.5789.68274@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
