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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
