Somewhere along the line, somebody decided to remove all trace of this
notation from the documentation text. It was still in the command syntax
synopses, or at least some of them, but with no indication what it meant.
This will not do, as evidenced by the confusion apparent in bug #7543;
even if the notation is now unnecessary, people will find it in legacy
SQL code and need to know what it does.
The documentation mentioned setting autovacuum_freeze_max_age to
"its maximum allowed value of a little less than two billion".
This led to a post asking about the exact maximum allowed value,
which is precisely two billion, not "a little less".
Based on question by Radovan Jablonovsky. Backpatch to 8.3.
The existing documentation in Linux Memory Overcommit seemed to
assume that PostgreSQL itself could never be the problem, or at
least it didn't tell you what to do about it.
Per discussion with Craig Ringer and Kevin Grittner.
libxslt offers the ability to read and write both files and URLs through
stylesheet commands, thus allowing unprivileged database users to both read
and write data with the privileges of the database server. Disable that
through proper use of libxslt's security options.
Also, remove xslt_process()'s ability to fetch documents and stylesheets
from external files/URLs. While this was a documented "feature", it was
long regarded as a terrible idea. The fix for CVE-2012-3489 broke that
capability, and rather than expend effort on trying to fix it, we're just
going to summarily remove it.
While the ability to write as well as read makes this security hole
considerably worse than CVE-2012-3489, the problem is mitigated by the fact
that xslt_process() is not available unless contrib/xml2 is installed,
and the longstanding warnings about security risks from that should have
discouraged prudent DBAs from installing it in security-exposed databases.
Reported and fixed by Peter Eisentraut.
Security: CVE-2012-3488
Should be limited to the maximum number of connections excluding
autovacuum workers, not including.
Add similar check for max_wal_senders, which should never be higher than
max_connections.
This backatches Heikki's patch in 140a4fbf1a
to make sure the documentation on the website gets updated, since
we're regularly receiving complains about this link.
It's still non-deterministic in some sense ... but given fixed settings
and identical planning problems, it will now always choose the same plan,
so we probably shouldn't tar it with that brush. Per bug #6565 from
Guillaume Cottenceau. Back-patch to 9.0 where the behavior was fixed.
Since 9.0, removing lots of large objects in a single transaction risks
exceeding max_locks_per_transaction, because we merged large object removal
into the generic object-drop mechanism, which takes out an exclusive lock
on each object to be dropped. This creates a hazard for contrib/vacuumlo,
which has historically tried to drop all unreferenced large objects in one
transaction. There doesn't seem to be any correctness requirement to do it
that way, though; we only need to drop enough large objects per transaction
to amortize the commit costs.
To prevent a regression from pre-9.0 releases wherein vacuumlo worked just
fine, back-patch commits b69f2e3640 and
64c604898e, which break vacuumlo's deletions
into multiple transactions with a user-controllable upper limit on the
number of objects dropped per transaction.
Tim Lewis, Robert Haas, Tom Lane
In backup.sgml, point out that you need to be using the logging collector
if you want to log messages from a failing archive_command script. (This
is an oversimplification, in that it will work without the collector as
long as you're not sending postmaster stderr to /dev/null; but it seems
like a good idea to encourage use of the collector to avoid problems
with multiple processes concurrently scribbling on one file.)
In config.sgml, do some wordsmithing of logging_collector discussion.
Per bug #6518 from Janning Vygen
This check was overlooked when we added function execute permissions to the
system years ago. For an ordinary trigger function it's not a big deal,
since trigger functions execute with the permissions of the table owner,
so they couldn't do anything the user issuing the CREATE TRIGGER couldn't
have done anyway. However, if a trigger function is SECURITY DEFINER,
that is not the case. The lack of checking would allow another user to
install it on his own table and then invoke it with, essentially, forged
input data; which the trigger function is unlikely to realize, so it might
do something undesirable, for instance insert false entries in an audit log
table.
Reported by Dinesh Kumar, patch by Robert Haas
Security: CVE-2012-0866
PGresults used to be read-only from the application's viewpoint, but now
that we've exposed various functions that allow modification of a PGresult,
that sweeping statement is no longer accurate. Noted by Dmitriy Igrishin.
The correct information appears in the text, so just remove the statement
in the table, where it did not fit nicely anyway. (Curiously, the correct
info has been there much longer than the erroneous table entry.)
Resolves problem noted by Daniele Varrazzo.
In HEAD and 9.1, also do a bit of wordsmithing on other text on the page.
The documentation neglected to explain its behavior in a script file
(it only ends execution of the script, not psql as a whole), and failed
to mention the long form \quit either.
This mode still exists for backwards compatibility, making
sslmode=require the same as sslmode=verify-ca when the file is present,
but not causing an error when it isn't.
Per bug 6189, reported by Srinivas Aji
