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
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Remove the outdated sentence.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)
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.
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
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.
The setting values of some parameters including max_worker_processes
must be equal to or higher than the values on the master. However,
previously max_worker_processes was not listed as such parameter
in the document. So this commit adds it to that list.
Back-patch to 9.4 where max_worker_processes was added.
The default argument, if given, has to be of exactly the same datatype
as the first argument; but this was not stated in so many words, and
the error message you get about it might not lead your thought in the
right direction. Per bug #13587 from Robert McGehee.
A quick scan says that these are the only two built-in functions with two
anyelement arguments and no other polymorphic arguments. There are plenty
of cases of, eg, anyarray and anyelement, but those seem less likely to
confuse. For instance this doesn't seem terribly hard to figure out:
"function array_remove(integer[], numeric) does not exist". So I've
contented myself with fixing these two cases.
This behavior wasn't documented, but it should be because it's user-visible
in triggers and other functions executed on the remote server.
Per question from Adam Fuchs.
Back-patch to 9.3 where postgres_fdw was added.
The table-rewriting forms of ALTER TABLE are MVCC-unsafe, in much the same
way as TRUNCATE, because they replace all rows of the table with newly-made
rows with a new xmin. (Ideally, concurrent transactions with old snapshots
would continue to see the old table contents, but the data is not there
anymore --- and if it were there, it would be inconsistent with the table's
updated rowtype, so there would be serious implementation problems to fix.)
This was nowhere documented though, and the problem was only documented for
TRUNCATE in a note in the TRUNCATE reference page. Create a new "Caveats"
section in the MVCC chapter that can be home to this and other limitations
on serializable consistency.
In passing, fix a mistaken statement that VACUUM and CLUSTER would reclaim
space occupied by a dropped column. They don't reconstruct existing tuples
so they couldn't do that.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Although initdb has long discouraged use of a filesystem mount-point
directory as a PG data directory, this point was covered nowhere in the
user-facing documentation. Also, with the popularity of pg_upgrade,
we really need to recommend that the PG user own not only the data
directory but its parent directory too. (Without a writable parent
directory, operations such as "mv data data.old" fail immediately.
pg_upgrade itself doesn't do that, but wrapper scripts for it often do.)
Hence, adjust the "Creating a Database Cluster" section to address
these points. I also took the liberty of wordsmithing the discussion
of NFS a bit.
These considerations aren't by any means new, so back-patch to all
supported branches.
While postgres' use of SSL renegotiation is a good idea in theory, it
turned out to not work well in practice. The specification and openssl's
implementation of it have lead to several security issues. Postgres' use
of renegotiation also had its share of bugs.
Additionally OpenSSL has a bunch of bugs around renegotiation, reported
and open for years, that regularly lead to connections breaking with
obscure error messages. We tried increasingly complex workarounds to get
around these bugs, but we didn't find anything complete.
Since these connection breakages often lead to hard to debug problems,
e.g. spuriously failing base backups and significant latency spikes when
synchronous replication is used, we have decided to change the default
setting for ssl renegotiation to 0 (disabled) in the released
backbranches and remove it entirely in 9.5 and master..
Author: Michael Paquier, with changes by me
Discussion: 20150624144148.GQ4797@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.0-9.4; 9.5 and master get a different patch
The documentation implied that there was seldom any reason to use the
array_append, array_prepend, and array_cat functions directly. But that's
not really true, because they can help make it clear which case is meant,
which the || operator can't do since it's overloaded to represent all three
cases. Add some discussion and examples illustrating the potentially
confusing behavior that can ensue if the parser misinterprets what was
meant.
Per a complaint from Michael Herold. Back-patch to 9.2, which is where ||
started to behave this way.
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.
This adjusts commit 82233ce7ea so that the
postmaster does not exit until all its child processes have exited, even
if the 5-second timeout elapses and we have to send SIGKILL. There is no
great value in having the postmaster process quit sooner, and doing so can
mislead onlookers into thinking that the cluster is fully terminated when
actually some child processes still survive.
This effect might explain recent test failures on buildfarm member hamster,
wherein we failed to restart a cluster just after shutting it down with
"pg_ctl stop -m immediate".
I also did a bit of code review/beautification, including fixing a faulty
use of the Max() macro on a volatile expression.
Back-patch to 9.4. In older branches, the postmaster never waited for
children to exit during immediate shutdowns, and changing that would be
too much of a behavioral change.
- 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.
