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PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 29, 2021

Posted on 2021-08-30 by PWN
PWN

PostgreSQL Weekly News - August 29, 2021

PostgreSQL Product News

pg_dbms_job 1.0.1, an extension to create, manage and use Oracle-style DBMS_JOB scheduled jobs, released.

dbMigration .NET v14.4, a database migration and sync tool, released.

WAL-G 1.1 a backup management system for PostgreSQL and other databases written in Go, released.

pglogical 2.4.0, a logical-WAL-based replication system for PostgreSQL, released.

Crunchy PostgreSQL Operator 5.0.0, a system for deploying and managing open source PostgreSQL clusters on Kubernetes, released.

set_user 2.0.1, an extension allowing privilege escalation with enhanced logging and control, released

AGE 0.5.0, a PostgreSQL extension that provides graph database functionality, released

pg_msvc_generator 1.0.0 beta, a tool for making Windows versions of extensions, released.

PostgreSQL Jobs for August

https://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jobs/2021-08/

PostgreSQL in the News

Planet PostgreSQL: https://planet.postgresql.org/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter

Submit news and announcements by Sunday at 3:00pm PST8PDT to david@fetter.org.

Applied Patches

Michaël Paquier pushed:

Bruce Momjian pushed:

Álvaro Herrera pushed:

Tom Lane pushed:

  • Prevent regexp back-refs from sometimes matching when they shouldn't. The recursion in cdissect() was careless about clearing match data for capturing parentheses after rejecting a partial match. This could allow a later back-reference to succeed when by rights it should fail for lack of a defined referent. To fix, think a little more rigorously about what the contract between different levels of cdissect's recursion needs to be. With the right spec, we can fix this using fewer rather than more resets of the match data; the key decision being that a failed sub-match is now explicitly responsible for clearing any matches it may have set. There are enough other cross-checks and optimizations in the code that it's not especially easy to exhibit this problem; usually, the match will fail as-expected. Plus, regexps that are even potentially vulnerable are most likely user errors, since there's just not much point in writing a back-ref that doesn't always have a referent. These facts perhaps explain why the issue hasn't been detected, even though it's almost certainly a couple of decades old. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/151435.1629733387@sss.pgh.pa.us https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/9bbf6f7341f2b5a8ce41d838154380faa7346101

  • Fix regexp misbehavior with capturing parens inside "{0}". Regexps like "(.){0}...\1" drew an "invalid backreference number". That's not unreasonable on its face, since the capture group will never be matched if it's iterated zero times. However, other engines such as Perl's don't complain about this, nor do we throw an error for related cases such as "(.)|\1", even though that backref can never succeed either. Also, if the zero-iterations case happens at runtime rather than compile time --- say, "(x)*...\1" when there's no "x" to be found --- that's not an error, we just deem the backref to not match. Making this even less defensible, no error was thrown for nested cases such as "((.)){0}...\2"; and to add insult to injury, those cases could result in assertion failures instead. (It seems that nothing especially bad happened in non-assert builds, though.) Let's just fix it so that no error is thrown and instead the backref is deemed to never match, so that compile-time detection of no iterations behaves the same as run-time detection. Per report from Mark Dilger. This appears to be an aboriginal error in Spencer's library, so back-patch to all supported versions. Pre-v14, it turns out to also be necessary to back-patch one aspect of commits cb76fbd7e/00116dee5, namely to create capture-node subREs with the begin/end states of their subexpressions, not the current lp/rp of the outer parseqatom invocation. Otherwise delsub complains that we're trying to disconnect a state from itself. This is a bit scary but code examination shows that it's safe: in the pre-v14 code, if we want to wrap iteration around the subexpression, the first thing we do is overwrite the atom's begin/end fields with new states. So the bogus values didn't survive long enough to be used for anything, except if no iteration is required, in which case it doesn't matter. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/A099E4A8-4377-4C64-A98C-3DEDDC075502@enterprisedb.com https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/65dc30ced64cd17f3800ff1b73ab1d358e92efd8

  • Remove redundant test. The condition "context_start < context_end" is strictly weaker than "context_end - context_start >= 50", so we don't need both. Oversight in commit ffd3944ab, noted by tanghy.fnst. In passing, line-wrap a nearby test to make it more readable. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/OS0PR01MB61137C4054774F44E3A9DC89FBC69@OS0PR01MB6113.jpnprd01.prod.outlook.com https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/373e08a9f771e724efd3bd29f78c39515792dcf3

  • Handle interaction of regexp's makesearch and MATCHALL more honestly. Second thoughts about commit 824bf7190: we apply makesearch() to an NFA after having determined whether it is a MATCHALL pattern. Prepending ".*" doesn't make it non-MATCHALL, but it does change the maximum possible match length, and makesearch() failed to update that. This has no ill effects given the stylized usage of search NFAs, but it seems like it's better to keep the data structure consistent. In particular, fixing this allows more honest handling of the MATCHALL check in matchuntil(): we can now assert that maxmatchall is infinity, instead of lamely assuming that it should act that way. In passing, improve the code in dump[c]nfa so that infinite maxmatchall is printed as "inf" not a magic number. https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/8f72becd6b9484fbb429651d8859faa36532a35a

  • Count SP-GiST index scans in pg_stat statistics. Somehow, spgist overlooked the need to call pgstat_count_index_scan(). Hence, pg_stat_all_indexes.idx_scan and equivalent columns never became nonzero for an SP-GiST index, although the related per-tuple counters worked fine. This fix works a bit differently from other index AMs, in that the counter increment occurs in spgrescan not spggettuple/spggetbitmap. It looks like this won't make the user-visible semantics noticeably different, so I won't go to the trouble of introducing an is-this- the-first-call flag just to make the counter bumps happen in the same places. Per bug #17163 from Christian Quest. Back-patch to all supported versions. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/17163-b8c5cc88322a5e92@postgresql.org https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3778bcb39a94a3b6a821fd60fcd9919a95725e78

  • Doc: add a little about LACON execution to src/backend/regex/README. I wrote this while thinking about a possible optimization, but it's a useful description of the existing code regardless of whether the optimization ever happens. So push it separately. https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/10d58228bb1c824c5124ecd1b6c5e46a3c157a39

Amit Kapila pushed:

  • Fix Alter Subscription's Add/Drop Publication behavior. The current refresh behavior tries to just refresh added/dropped publications but that leads to removing wrong tables from subscription. We can't refresh just the dropped publication because it is quite possible that some of the tables are removed from publication by that time and now those will remain as part of the subscription. Also, there is a chance that the tables that were part of the publication being dropped are also part of another publication, so we can't remove those. So, we decided that by default, add/drop commands will also act like REFRESH PUBLICATION which means they will refresh all the publications. We can keep the old behavior for "add publication" but it is better to be consistent with "drop publication". Author: Hou Zhijie Reviewed-by: Masahiko Sawada, Amit Kapila Backpatch-through: 14, where it was introduced Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/OS0PR01MB5716935D4C2CC85A6143073F94EF9@OS0PR01MB5716.jpnprd01.prod.outlook.com https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1046a69b3087a6417e85cae9b6bc76caa22f913b

  • Fix toast rewrites in logical decoding. Commit 325f2ec555 introduced pg_class.relwrite to skip operations on tables created as part of a heap rewrite during DDL. It links such transient heaps to the original relation OID via this new field in pg_class but forgot to do anything about toast tables. So, logical decoding was not able to skip operations on internally created toast tables. This leads to an error when we tried to decode the WAL for the next operation for which it appeared that there is a toast data where actually it didn't have any toast data. To fix this, we set pg_class.relwrite for internally created toast tables as well which allowed skipping operations on them during logical decoding. Author: Bertrand Drouvot Reviewed-by: David Zhang, Amit Kapila Backpatch-through: 11, where it was introduced Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/b5146fb1-ad9e-7d6e-f980-98ed68744a7c@amazon.com https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/29b5905470285bf730f6fe7cc5ddb3513d0e6945

  • Add logical change details to logical replication worker errcontext. Previously, on the subscriber, we set the error context callback for the tuple data conversion failures. This commit replaces the existing error context callback with a comprehensive one so that it shows not only the details of data conversion failures but also the details of logical change being applied by the apply worker or table sync worker. The additional information displayed will be the command, transaction id, and timestamp. The error context is added to an error only when applying a change but not while doing other work like receiving data etc. This will help users in diagnosing the problems that occur during logical replication. It also can be used for future work that allows skipping a particular transaction on the subscriber. Author: Masahiko Sawada Reviewed-by: Hou Zhijie, Greg Nancarrow, Haiying Tang, Amit Kapila Tested-by: Haiying Tang Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAD21AoDeScrsHhLyEPYqN3sydg6PxAPVBboK=30xJfUVihNZDA@mail.gmail.com https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/abc0910e2e0adfc5a17e035465ee31242e32c4fc

Fujii Masao pushed:

Etsuro Fujita pushed:

Peter Eisentraut pushed:

Robert Haas pushed:

  • Fix broken snapshot handling in parallel workers. Pengchengliu reported an assertion failure in a parallel woker while performing a parallel scan using an overflowed snapshot. The proximate cause is that TransactionXmin was set to an incorrect value. The underlying cause is incorrect snapshot handling in parallel.c. In particular, InitializeParallelDSM() was unconditionally calling GetTransactionSnapshot(), because I (rhaas) mistakenly thought that was always retrieving an existing snapshot whereas, at isolation levels less than REPEATABLE READ, it's actually taking a new one. So instead do this only at higher isolation levels where there actually is a single snapshot for the whole transaction. By itself, this is not a sufficient fix, because we still need to guarantee that TransactionXmin gets set properly in the workers. The easiest way to do that seems to be to install the leader's active snapshot as the transaction snapshot if the leader did not serialize a transaction snapshot. This doesn't affect the results of future GetTrasnactionSnapshot() calls since those have to take a new snapshot anyway; what we care about is the side effect of setting TransactionXmin. Report by Pengchengliu. Patch by Greg Nancarrow, except for some comment text which I supplied. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/002f01d748ac$eaa781a0$bff684e0$@tju.edu.cn https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/a780b2fcce6cf45462946fffcd84021a4d1429c8

John Naylor pushed:

Peter Geoghegan pushed:

Daniel Gustafsson pushed:

Stephen Frost pushed:

Noah Misch pushed:

  • Fix data loss in wal_level=minimal crash recovery of CREATE TABLESPACE. If the system crashed between CREATE TABLESPACE and the next checkpoint, the result could be some files in the tablespace unexpectedly containing no rows. Affected files would be those for which the system did not write WAL; see the wal_skip_threshold documentation. Before v13, a different set of conditions governed the writing of WAL; see v12's <sect2 id="populate-pitr">. (The v12 conditions were broader in some ways and narrower in others.) Users may want to audit non-default tablespaces for unexpected short files. The bug could have truncated an index without affecting the associated table, and reindexing the index would fix that particular problem. This fixes the bug by making create_tablespace_directories() more like TablespaceCreateDbspace(). create_tablespace_directories() was recursively removing tablespace contents, reasoning that WAL redo would recreate everything removed that way. That assumption holds for other wal_level values. Under wal_level=minimal, the old approach could delete files for which no other copy existed. Back-patch to 9.6 (all supported versions). Reviewed by Robert Haas and Prabhat Sahu. Reported by Robert Haas. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoaLO9ncuwvr2nN-J4VEP5XyAcy=zKiHxQzBbFRxxGxm0w@mail.gmail.com https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/97ddda8a82ac470ae581d0eb485b6577707678bc