The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
in CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION. The original code would update pg_shdepend
as if a new function was being created, even if it wasn't, with two bad
consequences: pg_shdepend might record the wrong owner for the function,
and any dependencies for roles mentioned in the function's ACL would be lost.
The fix is very easy: just don't touch pg_shdepend at all when doing a
function replacement.
Also update the CREATE FUNCTION reference page, which never explained
exactly what changes and doesn't change in a function replacement.
In passing, fix the CREATE VIEW reference page similarly; there's no
code bug there, but the docs didn't say what happens.
to unload and re-load the library.
The difficulty with unloading a library is that we haven't defined safe
protocols for doing so. In particular, there's no safe mechanism for
getting out of a "hook" function pointer unless libraries are unloaded
in reverse order of loading. And there's no mechanism at all for undefining
a custom GUC variable, so GUC would be left with a pointer to an old value
that might or might not still be valid, and very possibly wouldn't be in
the same place anymore.
While the unload and reload behavior had some usefulness in easing
development of new loadable libraries, it's of no use whatever to normal
users, so just disabling it isn't giving up that much. Someday we might
care to expend the effort to develop safe unload protocols; but even if
we did, there'd be little certainty that every third-party loadable module
was following them, so some security restrictions would still be needed.
Back-patch to 8.2; before that, LOAD was superuser-only anyway.
Security: unprivileged users could crash backend. CVE not assigned yet
so that user-defined window functions are possible. For the moment you'll
have to write them in C, for lack of any interface to the WindowObject API
in the available PLs, but it's better than no support at all.
There was some debate about the best syntax for this. I ended up choosing
the "it's an attribute" position --- the other approach will inevitably be
more work, and the likely market for user-defined window functions is
probably too small to justify it.
another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).
This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.
so long as all the trailing arguments are of the same (non-array) type.
The function receives them as a single array argument (which is why they
have to all be the same type).
It might be useful to extend this facility to aggregates, but this patch
doesn't do that.
This patch imposes a noticeable slowdown on function lookup --- a follow-on
patch will fix that by adding a redundant column to pg_proc.
Pavel Stehule
transaction, unless rolled back or overridden by a SET clause for the same
variable attached to a surrounding function call. Per discussion, these
seem the best semantics. Note that this is an INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: in 8.0
through 8.2, SET LOCAL's effects disappeared at subtransaction commit
(leading to behavior that made little sense at the SQL level).
I took advantage of the opportunity to rewrite and simplify the GUC variable
save/restore logic a little bit. The old idea of a "tentative" value is gone;
it was a hangover from before we had a stack. Also, we no longer need a stack
entry for every nesting level, but only for those in which a variable's value
actually changed.
(Actually, it works as a plain statement too, but I didn't document that
because it seems a bit useless.) Unify VariableResetStmt with
VariableSetStmt, and clean up some ancient cruft in the representation of
same.
There are still some loose ends: I didn't do anything about the SET FROM
CURRENT idea yet, and it's not real clear whether we are happy with the
interaction of SET LOCAL with function-local settings. The documentation
is a bit spartan, too.
This is needed to allow a security-definer function to set a truly secure
value of search_path. Without it, a malicious user can use temporary objects
to execute code with the privileges of the security-definer function. Even
pushing the temp schema to the back of the search path is not quite good
enough, because a function or operator at the back of the path might still
capture control from one nearer the front due to having a more exact datatype
match. Hence, disable searching the temp schema altogether for functions and
operators.
Security: CVE-2007-2138
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
columns procost and prorows, to allow simple user adjustment of the estimated
cost of a function call, as well as control of the estimated number of rows
returned by a set-returning function. We might eventually wish to extend this
to allow function-specific estimation routines, but there seems to be
consensus that we should try a simple constant estimate first. In particular
this provides a relatively simple way to control the order in which different
WHERE clauses are applied in a plan node, which is a Good Thing in view of the
fact that the recent EquivalenceClass planner rewrite made that much less
predictable than before.
mode see a fresh snapshot for each command in the function, rather than
using the latest interactive command's snapshot. Also, suppress fresh
snapshots as well as CommandCounterIncrement inside STABLE and IMMUTABLE
functions, instead using the snapshot taken for the most closely nested
regular query. (This behavior is only sane for read-only functions, so
the patch also enforces that such functions contain only SELECT commands.)
As per my proposal of 6-Sep-2004; I note that I floated essentially the
same proposal on 19-Jun-2002, but that discussion tailed off without any
action. Since 8.0 seems like the right place to be taking possibly
nontrivial backwards compatibility hits, let's get it done now.
