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2015-07-09Fix another broken link in documentation.Heikki Linnakangas
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.
2015-07-06Remove incorrect warning from pg_archivecleanup document.Fujii Masao
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.
2015-06-30Fix broken link in documentation.Tom Lane
HP's web server has apparently become case-sensitive sometime recently. Per bug #13479 from Daniel Abraham. Corrected link identified by Alvaro.
2015-06-25Docs: fix claim that to_char('FM') removes trailing zeroes.Tom Lane
Of course, what it removes is leading zeroes. Seems to have been a thinko in commit ffe92d15d53625d5ae0c23f4e1984ed43614a33d. Noted by Hubert Depesz Lubaczewski.
2015-06-19In immediate shutdown, postmaster should not exit till children are gone.Tom Lane
This adjusts commit 82233ce7ea42d6ba519aaec63008aff49da6c7af 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.
2015-06-09Release notes for 9.4.4, 9.3.9, 9.2.13, 9.1.18, 9.0.22.Tom Lane
2015-06-04Fix some issues in pg_class.relminmxid and pg_database.datminmxid documentation.Fujii Masao
- 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.
2015-06-01Release notes for 9.4.3, 9.3.8, 9.2.12, 9.1.17, 9.0.21.Tom Lane
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.
2015-05-19Last-minute updates for release notes.REL9_4_2Tom Lane
Revise description of CVE-2015-3166, in line with scaled-back patch. Change release date. Security: CVE-2015-3166
2015-05-18Last-minute updates for release notes.Tom Lane
Add entries for security issues. Security: CVE-2015-3165 through CVE-2015-3167
2015-05-18pgcrypto: Report errant decryption as "Wrong key or corrupt data".Noah Misch
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
2015-05-17Release notes for 9.4.2, 9.3.7, 9.2.11, 9.1.16, 9.0.20.Tom Lane
2015-05-16Fix docs typoTom Lane
I don't think "respectfully" is what was meant here ...
2015-05-14Docs: fix erroneous claim about max byte length of GB18030.Tom Lane
This encoding has characters up to 4 bytes long, not 2.
2015-05-11Increase threshold for multixact member emergency autovac to 50%.Robert Haas
Analysis by Noah Misch shows that the 25% threshold set by commit 53bb309d2d5a9432d2602c93ed18e58bd2924e15 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 04e6d3b877e060d8445eb653b7ea26b1ee5cec6b, which taught autovacuum to run for multixact wraparound even when autovacuum is configured off.
2015-05-08Recommend include_realm=1 in docsStephen Frost
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.
2015-05-08Teach autovacuum about multixact member wraparound.Robert Haas
The logic introduced in commit b69bf30b9bfacafc733a9ba77c9587cf54d06c0c and repaired in commits 669c7d20e6374850593cb430d332e11a3992bbcf and 7be47c56af3d3013955c91c2877c08f2a0e3e6a2 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
2015-05-05citext's regexp_matches() functions weren't documented, either.Tom Lane
2015-04-16pg_upgrade: document need for text search files to be copiedBruce Momjian
Report by CJ Estel Backpatch through 9.4
2015-04-09Fix incorrect punctuationMagnus Hagander
Amit Langote
2015-04-07Fix spelling of author's nameSimon Riggs
2015-04-06Fix typo in libpq.sgml.Fujii Masao
Back-patch to all supported versions. Michael Paquier
2015-04-01psql: fix \connect with URIs and conninfo stringsAlvaro Herrera
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.
2015-03-31Fix incorrect markup in documentation of window frame clauses.Tom Lane
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.
2015-03-08Fix documentation for libpq's PQfn().Tom Lane
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.
2015-03-02Fix pg_dump handling of extension config tablesStephen Frost
Since 9.1, we've provided extensions with a way to denote "configuration" tables- tables created by an extension which the user may modify. By marking these as "configuration" tables, the extension is asking for the data in these tables to be pg_dump'd (tables which are not marked in this way are assumed to be entirely handled during CREATE EXTENSION and are not included at all in a pg_dump). Unfortunately, pg_dump neglected to consider foreign key relationships between extension configuration tables and therefore could end up trying to reload the data in an order which would cause FK violations. This patch teaches pg_dump about these dependencies, so that the data dumped out is done so in the best order possible. Note that there's no way to handle circular dependencies, but those have yet to be seen in the wild. The release notes for this should include a caution to users that existing pg_dump-based backups may be invalid due to this issue. The data is all there, but restoring from it will require extracting the data for the configuration tables and then loading them in the correct order by hand. Discussed initially back in bug #6738, more recently brought up by Gilles Darold, who provided an initial patch which was further reworked by Michael Paquier. Further modifications and documentation updates by me. Back-patch to 9.1 where we added the concept of extension configuration tables.
2015-02-23Fix potential deadlock with libpq non-blocking mode.Heikki Linnakangas
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.
2015-02-17Remove code to match IPv4 pg_hba.conf entries to IPv4-in-IPv6 addresses.Tom Lane
In investigating yesterday's crash report from Hugo Osvaldo Barrera, I only looked back as far as commit f3aec2c7f51904e7 where the breakage occurred (which is why I thought the IPv4-in-IPv6 business was undocumented). But actually the logic dates back to commit 3c9bb8886df7d56a 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.
2015-02-12Fix typo in logicaldecoding.sgml.Andres Freund
Author: Tatsuo Ishii Backpatch to 9.4, where logicaldecoding was introduced.
2015-02-11Fixed array handling in ecpg.Michael Meskes
When ecpg was rewritten to the new protocol version not all variable types were corrected. This patch rewrites the code for these types to fix that. It also fixes the documentation to correctly tell the status of array handling.
2015-02-06Report WAL flush, not insert, position in replication IDENTIFY_SYSTEMHeikki Linnakangas
When beginning streaming replication, the client usually issues the IDENTIFY_SYSTEM command, which used to return the current WAL insert position. That's not suitable for the intended purpose of that field, however. pg_receivexlog uses it to start replication from the reported point, but if it hasn't been flushed to disk yet, it will fail. Change IDENTIFY_SYSTEM to report the flush position instead. Backpatch to 9.1 and above. 9.0 doesn't report any WAL position.
2015-02-04doc: Fix markupFujii Masao
Ian Barwick
2015-02-02Last-minute updates for release notes.Tom Lane
Add entries for security issues. Security: CVE-2015-0241 through CVE-2015-0244
2015-02-02Doc: fix syntax description for psql's \setenv.Tom Lane
The variable name isn't optional --- looks like a copy-and-paste-o from the \set command, where it is. Dilip Kumar
2015-02-01doc: Improve claim about location of pg_service.confPeter Eisentraut
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.
2015-02-01Release notes for 9.4.1, 9.3.6, 9.2.10, 9.1.15, 9.0.19.Tom Lane
2015-01-31Fix documentation of psql's ECHO all mode.Tom Lane
"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.
2015-01-30Fix jsonb Unicode escape processing, and in consequence disallow \u0000.Tom Lane
We've been trying to support \u0000 in JSON values since commit 78ed8e03c67d7333, and have introduced increasingly worse hacks to try to make it work, such as commit 0ad1a816320a2b53. However, it fundamentally can't work in the way envisioned, because the stored representation looks the same as for \\u0000 which is not the same thing at all. It's also entirely bogus to output \u0000 when de-escaped output is called for. The right way to do this would be to store an actual 0x00 byte, and then throw error only if asked to produce de-escaped textual output. However, getting to that point seems likely to take considerable work and may well never be practical in the 9.4.x series. To preserve our options for better behavior while getting rid of the nasty side-effects of 0ad1a816320a2b53, revert that commit in toto and instead throw error if \u0000 is used in a context where it needs to be de-escaped. (These are the same contexts where non-ASCII Unicode escapes throw error if the database encoding isn't UTF8, so this behavior is by no means without precedent.) In passing, make both the \u0000 case and the non-ASCII Unicode case report ERRCODE_UNTRANSLATABLE_CHARACTER / "unsupported Unicode escape sequence" rather than claiming there's something wrong with the input syntax. Back-patch to 9.4, where we have to do something because 0ad1a816320a2b53 broke things for many cases having nothing to do with \u0000. 9.3 also has bogus behavior, but only for that specific escape value, so given the lack of field complaints it seems better to leave 9.3 alone.
2015-01-19doc: Fix typos in make_timestamp{,tz} examplesAlvaro Herrera
Pointed out by Alan Mogi (bug #12571)
2015-01-06Update copyright for 2015Bruce Momjian
Backpatch certain files through 9.0
2015-01-03Treat negative values of recovery_min_apply_delay as having no effect.Tom Lane
At one point in the development of this feature, it was claimed that allowing negative values would be useful to compensate for timezone differences between master and slave servers. That was based on a mistaken assumption that commit timestamps are recorded in local time; but of course they're in UTC. Nor is a negative apply delay likely to be a sane way of coping with server clock skew. However, the committed patch still treated negative delays as doing something, and the timezone misapprehension survived in the user documentation as well. If recovery_min_apply_delay were a proper GUC we'd just set the minimum allowed value to be zero; but for the moment it seems better to treat negative settings as if they were zero. In passing do some extra wordsmithing on the parameter's documentation, including correcting a second misstatement that the parameter affects processing of Restore Point records. Issue noted by Michael Paquier, who also provided the code patch; doc changes by me. Back-patch to 9.4 where the feature was introduced.
2015-01-03Make path to pg_service.conf absolute in documentationMagnus Hagander
The system file is always in the absolute path /etc/, not relative. David Fetter
2014-12-31Docs: improve descriptions of ISO week-numbering date features.Tom Lane
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.
2014-12-31Improve consistency of parsing of psql's magic variables.Tom Lane
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.
2014-12-29Assorted minor fixes for psql metacommand docs.Tom Lane
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.
2014-12-22Further tidy up on json aggregate documentationAndrew Dunstan
2014-12-22Fix documentation of argument type of json_agg and jsonb_aggAndrew Dunstan
json_agg was originally designed to aggregate records. However, it soon became clear that it is useful for aggregating all kinds of values and that's what we have on 9.3 and 9.4, and in head for it and jsonb_agg. The documentation suggested otherwise, so this fixes it.
2014-12-21Docs: clarify treatment of variadic functions with zero variadic arguments.Tom Lane
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.
2014-12-18Improve documentation about CASE and constant subexpressions.Tom Lane
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.
2014-12-17Lock down regression testing temporary clusters on Windows.Noah Misch
Use SSPI authentication to allow connections exclusively from the OS user that launched the test suite. This closes on Windows the vulnerability that commit be76a6d39e2832d4b88c0e1cc381aa44a7f86881 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