This addresses two issues in the tests of test_oat_hooks:
- The role regress_test_user was being left behind, preventing the test
to succeed on repeated runs. It makes sense to leave some objects
behind to have more coverage for pg_upgrade (as does test_pg_dump), but
the role dropped here does not own any objects so there is no reason to
keep it.
- GRANT SET ON PARAMETER is issued, creating an entry in
pg_parameter_acl without cleaning up the entry created. This causes
an overlap with unsafe_tests as both use work_mem, making the latter
fail. This commit adds an extra REVOKE SET ON PARAMETER to clean the
contents of pg_parameter_acl, switching to maintenance_work_mem rather
than work_mem to avoid an overlap between both tests.
The tests of test_oat_hooks cannot use installcheck yet as these are
proving to be unstable with caching and the namespace search hooks, so
the issues fixed here cannot be reached yet, but they would be once the
hook issue is addressed and installcheck is allowed again in
test_oat_hooks.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/YrpVkADAY0knF6vM@paquier.xyz
Backpatch-through: 15
In the same vein as commit 251154beb, make it clear that we never
instantiate PlanState.
Also mark MemoryContextData as abstract. This has no effect right now,
since memnodes.h isn't one of the files fed to gen_node_support.pl.
But it seems like good documentation and future-proofing.
PostgreSQL contains the implementation of the red-black tree. The red-black
tree is the ordered data structure, and one of its advantages is the ability
to do inequality searches. This commit adds rbt_find_less() and
rbt_find_great() functions implementing these searches. While these searches
aren't yet used in the core code, they might be useful for extensions.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAGRrpzYE8-7GCoaPjOiL9T_HY605MRax-2jgTtLq236uksZ1Sw%40mail.gmail.com
Author: Steve Chavez, Alexander Korotkov
Reviewed-by: Alexander Korotkov
We were going into IDLE state too soon when executing queries via
PQsendQuery in pipeline mode, causing several scenarios to misbehave in
different ways -- most notably, as reported by Daniele Varrazzo, that a
warning message is produced by libpq:
message type 0x33 arrived from server while idle
But it is also possible, if queries are sent and results consumed not in
lockstep, for the expected mediating NULL result values from PQgetResult
to be lost (a problem which has not been reported, but which is more
serious).
Fix this by introducing two new concepts: one is a command queue element
PGQUERY_CLOSE to tell libpq to wait for the CloseComplete server
response to the Close message that is sent by PQsendQuery. Because the
application is not expecting any PGresult from this, the mechanism to
consume it is a bit hackish.
The other concept, authored by Horiguchi-san, is a PGASYNC_PIPELINE_IDLE
state for libpq's state machine to differentiate "really idle" from
merely "the idle state that occurs in between reading results from the
server for elements in the pipeline". This makes libpq not go fully
IDLE when the libpq command queue contains entries; in normal cases, we
only go IDLE once at the end of the pipeline, when the server response
to the final SYNC message is received. (However, there are corner cases
it doesn't fix, such as terminating the query sequence by
PQsendFlushRequest instead of PQpipelineSync; this sort of scenario is
what requires PGQUERY_CLOSE bit above.)
This last bit helps make the libpq state machine clearer; in particular
we can get rid of an ugly hack in pqParseInput3 to avoid considering
IDLE as such when the command queue contains entries.
A new test mode is added to libpq_pipeline.c to tickle some related
problematic cases.
Reported-by: Daniele Varrazzo <daniele.varrazzo@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Kyotaro Horiguchi <horikyota.ntt@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+mi_8bvD0_CW3sumgwPvWdNzXY32itoG_16tDYRu_1S2gV2iw@mail.gmail.com
There were many calls to construct_array() and deconstruct_array() for
built-in types, for example, when dealing with system catalog columns.
These all hardcoded the type attributes necessary to pass to these
functions.
To simplify this a bit, add construct_array_builtin(),
deconstruct_array_builtin() as wrappers that centralize this hardcoded
knowledge. This simplifies many call sites and reduces the amount of
hardcoded stuff that is spread around.
Reviewed-by: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/2914356f-9e5f-8c59-2995-5997fc48bcba%40enterprisedb.com
This reverts commits 5753d4ee32 and fe60b67250 that modified HOT to
ignore BRIN indexes. The commit message for 5753d4ee32 claims that:
When determining whether an index update may be skipped by using
HOT, we can ignore attributes indexed only by BRIN indexes. There
are no index pointers to individual tuples in BRIN, and the page
range summary will be updated anyway as it relies on visibility
info.
This is partially incorrect - it's true BRIN indexes don't point to
individual tuples, so HOT chains are not an issue, but the visibitlity
info is not sufficient to keep the index up to date. This can easily
result in corrupted indexes, as demonstrated in the hackers thread.
This does not mean relaxing the HOT restrictions for BRIN is a lost
cause, but it needs to handle the two aspects (allowing HOT chains and
updating the page range summaries) as separate. But that requires a
major changes, and it's too late for that in the current dev cycle.
Reported-by: Tomas Vondra
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/05ebcb44-f383-86e3-4f31-0a97a55634cf@enterprisedb.com
This new-in-v15 test case assumed it could set max_stack_depth as high
as 2MB. You might think that'd be true on any modern platform but
you'd be wrong, as I found out while experimenting with NetBSD/hppa.
This test is about privileges not platform capabilities, so there seems
no need to use any value greater than the 100kB setting already used
in a couple of places in the core regression tests. There's certainly
no call to expect people to raise their platform's default ulimit just
to run this test.
The code for unloading a library has been commented-out for over 12
years, ever since commit 602a9ef5a7c60151e10293ae3c4bb3fbb0132d03, and we're
no closer to supporting it now than we were back then.
Nathan Bossart, reviewed by Michael Paquier and by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/Ynsc9bRL1caUSBSE@paquier.xyz
Previously the statistics collector received statistics updates via UDP and
shared statistics data by writing them out to temporary files regularly. These
files can reach tens of megabytes and are written out up to twice a
second. This has repeatedly prevented us from adding additional useful
statistics.
Now statistics are stored in shared memory. Statistics for variable-numbered
objects are stored in a dshash hashtable (backed by dynamic shared
memory). Fixed-numbered stats are stored in plain shared memory.
The header for pgstat.c contains an overview of the architecture.
The stats collector is not needed anymore, remove it.
By utilizing the transactional statistics drop infrastructure introduced in a
prior commit statistics entries cannot "leak" anymore. Previously leaked
statistics were dropped by pgstat_vacuum_stat(), called from [auto-]vacuum. On
systems with many small relations pgstat_vacuum_stat() could be quite
expensive.
Now that replicas drop statistics entries for dropped objects, it is not
necessary anymore to reset stats when starting from a cleanly shut down
replica.
Subsequent commits will perform some further code cleanup, adapt docs and add
tests.
Bumps PGSTAT_FILE_FORMAT_ID.
Author: Kyotaro Horiguchi <horikyota.ntt@gmail.com>
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Author: Melanie Plageman <melanieplageman@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-By: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>
Reviewed-By: "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com> (in a much earlier version)
Reviewed-By: Arthur Zakirov <a.zakirov@postgrespro.ru> (in a much earlier version)
Reviewed-By: Antonin Houska <ah@cybertec.at> (in a much earlier version)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20220303021600.hs34ghqcw6zcokdh@alap3.anarazel.de
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20220308205351.2xcn6k4x5yivcxyd@alap3.anarazel.de
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20210319235115.y3wz7hpnnrshdyv6@alap3.anarazel.de
This patch allows "PGC_SUSET" parameters to be set by non-superusers
if they have been explicitly granted the privilege to do so.
The privilege to perform ALTER SYSTEM SET/RESET on a specific parameter
can also be granted.
Such privileges are cluster-wide, not per database. They are tracked
in a new shared catalog, pg_parameter_acl.
Granting and revoking these new privileges works as one would expect.
One caveat is that PGC_USERSET GUCs are unaffected by the SET privilege
--- one could wish that those were handled by a revocable grant to
PUBLIC, but they are not, because we couldn't make it robust enough
for GUCs defined by extensions.
Mark Dilger, reviewed at various times by Andrew Dunstan, Robert Haas,
Joshua Brindle, and myself
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3D691E20-C1D5-4B80-8BA5-6BEB63AF3029@enterprisedb.com
Generally if a role is granted membership to another role with NOINHERIT
they must use SET ROLE to access the privileges of that role, however
with predefined roles the membership and privilege is conflated. Fix that
by replacing is_member_of_role with has_privs_for_role for predefined
roles. Patch does not remove is_member_of_role from acl.h, but it does
add a warning not to use that function for privilege checking. Not
backpatched based on hackers list discussion.
Author: Joshua Brindle
Reviewed-by: Stephen Frost, Nathan Bossart, Joe Conway
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/flat/CAGB+Vh4Zv_TvKt2tv3QNS6tUM_F_9icmuj0zjywwcgVi4PAhFA@mail.gmail.com
Commit 90efa2f556 caused some issues with EXEC_BACKEND builds and with
force_parallel_mode = regress setups. For the first issue we no longer
test if the module has been preloaded, and in fact we don't preload it,
but simply LOAD it in the test script. For the second issue we suppress
error messages emanating from parallel workers.
Mark Dilger
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/7f6d54a1-4024-3b6e-e3ec-26cd394aac9e@dunslane.net
This includes tests of both the newly added name type object access
hooks and the older Oid type hooks, and provides a useful example
of how to use the hooks.
Mark Dilger, based on some code from Joshua Brindle.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/47F87A0E-C0E5-43A6-89F6-D403F2B45175@enterprisedb.com
Commit 75d22069e tried to throw a warning for setting a custom GUC whose
prefix belongs to a previously-loaded extension, if there is no such GUC
defined by the extension. But that caused unstable behavior with
parallel workers, because workers don't necessarily load extensions and
GUCs in the same order their leader did. To make that work safely, we
have to completely disallow the case. We now actually remove any such
GUCs at the time of initial extension load, and then throw an error not
just a warning if you try to add one later. While this might create a
compatibility issue for a few people, the improvement in error-detection
capability seems worth it; it's hard to believe that there's any good
use-case for choosing such GUC names.
This also un-reverts 5609cc01c (Rename EmitWarningsOnPlaceholders() to
MarkGUCPrefixReserved()), since that function's old name is now even
more of a misnomer.
Florin Irion and Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1902182.1640711215@sss.pgh.pa.us
src/backend/utils/misc/check_guc is a script that cross-checks the
consistency of the GUCs with postgresql.conf.sample, making sure that
its format is in line with what guc.c has. It has never been run
automatically, and has rotten over the years, creating a lot of false
positives as per a report from Justin Pryzby.
d10e41d has introduced a SQL function to publish the most relevant flags
associated to a GUC, with tests added in the main regression test suite
to make sure that we avoid most of the inconsistencies in the GUC
settings, based on recent reports, but there was nothing able to
cross-check postgresql.conf.sample with the contents of guc.c.
This commit adds a TAP test that covers the remaining gap. It emulates
the most relevant checks that check_guc did, so as any format mistakes
are detected in postgresql.conf.sample at development stage, with the
following checks:
- Check that parameters marked as NOT_IN_SAMPLE are not in the sample
file.
- Check that there are no dead entries in postgresql.conf.sample for
parameters not marked as NOT_IN_SAMPLE.
- Check that no parameters are missing from the sample file if listed in
guc.c without NOT_IN_SAMPLE.
The idea of building a list of the GUCs by parsing the sample file comes
from Justin, and he wrote the regex used in the patch to find all the
GUCs (this same formatting rule basically applies for the last 20~ years
or so). In order to test this patch, I have played with manual
modifications of postgresql.conf.sample and guc.c, making sure that we
detect problems with the GUC rules and the sample file format.
The test is located in src/test/modules/test_misc, which is the best
location I could think about for such sanity checks, rather than the
main regression test suite (src/test/regress) to avoid a new type of
dependency with the source tree.
The first attempt of this patch was b0a55f4, where the location of
postgresql.conf.sample was retrieved using pg_config --sharedir. This
has proven to be an issue for distributions that patch pg_config to
enforce the installation paths at some wanted location (like Debian),
that may not exist when the test is run, hence causing a failure.
Instead of that, as per a suggestion from Andres Freund, rely on the
fact that the test is always executed from its directory in the source
tree and use a relative path to find the sample file. This works for
the CI, VPATH builds and on Windows, and tests like the recovery one
added in f47ed79 rely on that already.
Reviewed-by: Justin Pryzby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/Yf9YGSwPiMu0c7fP@paquier.xyz
This reverts commit b0a55f4, to remove for now the TAP test that did the
equivalent of check_guc. The test has been using pg_config --sharedir
to find the location of postgresql.conf.sample. While the buildfarm and
normal build environments rather liked that, this proves to be an issue
for Debian where pg_config is patched to not be relocatable, causing the
test to fail.
Rather than relying on pg_config, we'd better find the sample file based
on its location from the source directory. However, this is also an
issue as a TAP test only offers the build directory as of TESTDIR in the
environment context, so this would fail with VPATH builds. Perhaps the
source path could be provided additionally when running the TAP tests.
Or perhaps we may be able to get away by just switching to a SQL
approach, by using PG_ABS_SRCDIR but this is going to require some extra
loops to get the sample file from the correct path in src/backend/. In
any case, this needs more thoughts, so just revert the test case until
something better is done about this relocation problem.
Reported-by: Christopher Berg
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/YgYw25OXV5men8Fj@msg.df7cb.de
Rather than doing manual book keeping to plan the number of tests to run
in each TAP suite, conclude each run with done_testing() summing up the
the number of tests that ran. This removes the need for maintaning and
updating the plan count at the expense of an accurate count of remaining
during the test suite runtime.
This patch has been discussed a number of times, often in the context of
other patches which updates tests, so a larger number of discussions can
be found in the archives.
Reviewed-by: Julien Rouhaud <rjuju123@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker <ilmari@ilmari.org>
Reviewed-by: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>
Reviewed-by: Kyotaro Horiguchi <horikyota.ntt@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/DD399313-3D56-4666-8079-88949DAC870F@yesql.se
src/backend/utils/misc/check_guc is a script that cross-checks the
consistency of the GUCs with postgresql.conf.sample, making sure that
its format is in line with what guc.c has. It has never been run
automatically, and has rotten over the years, creating a lot of false
positives as per a report from Justin Pryzby.
d10e41d has introduced a SQL function to publish the most relevant flags
associated to a GUC, with tests added in the main regression test suite
to make sure that we avoid most of the inconsistencies in the GUC
settings, based on recent reports, but there was nothing able to
cross-check postgresql.conf.sample with the contents of guc.c.
This commit adds a TAP test that covers the remaining gap. It emulates
the most relevant checks that check_guc does, so as any format mistakes
are detected in postgresql.conf.sample at development stage, with the
following checks:
- Check that parameters marked as NOT_IN_SAMPLE are not in the sample
file.
- Check that there are no dead entries in postgresql.conf.sample for
parameters not marked as NOT_IN_SAMPLE.
- Check that no parameters are missing from the sample file if listed in
guc.c without NOT_IN_SAMPLE.
The idea of building a list of the GUCs by parsing the sample file comes
from Justin, and he wrote the regex used in the patch to find all the
GUCs (this same formatting rule basically applies for the last 20~ years
or so). In order to test this patch, I have played with manual
modifications of postgresql.conf.sample and guc.c, making sure that we
detect problems with the GUC rules and the sample file format.
The test is located in src/test/modules/test_misc, which is the best
location I could think about for such sanity checks.
Reviewed-by: Justin Pryzby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/Yf9YGSwPiMu0c7fP@paquier.xyz
This fixes a set of issues that have accumulated over the past months
(or years) in various code areas. Most fixes are related to some recent
additions, as of the development of v15.
Author: Justin Pryzby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20220124030001.GQ23027@telsasoft.com
Currently, database OIDs, relfilenodes, and tablespace OIDs can all
change when a cluster is upgraded using pg_upgrade. It seems better
to preserve them, because (1) it makes troubleshooting pg_upgrade
easier, since you don't have to do a lot of work to match up files
in the old and new clusters, (2) it allows 'rsync' to save bandwidth
when used to re-sync a cluster after an upgrade, and (3) if we ever
encrypt or sign blocks, we would likely want to use a nonce that
depends on these values.
This patch only arranges to preserve relfilenodes and tablespace
OIDs. The task of preserving database OIDs is left for another patch,
since it involves some complexities that don't exist in these cases.
Database OIDs have a similar issue, but there are some tricky points
in that case that do not apply to these cases, so that problem is left
for another patch.
Shruthi KC, based on an earlier patch from Antonin Houska, reviewed
and with some adjustments by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoYgTwYcUmB=e8+hRHOFA0kkS6Kde85+UNdon6q7bt1niQ@mail.gmail.com
Revert commits 5609cc01c, 2ed8a8cc5, and 75d22069e until we have
a less broken idea of how this should work in parallel workers.
Per buildfarm.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1640909.1640638123@sss.pgh.pa.us
This seems like a clearer name for what it does now.
Provide a compatibility macro so that extensions don't have to convert
to the new name right away.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/116024.1640111629@sss.pgh.pa.us
Extensions that define any custom GUCs should call
EmitWarningsOnPlaceholders after doing so, to help catch misspellings.
Many of our contrib modules hadn't gotten the memo on that, though.
Also add such calls to src/test/modules extensions that have GUCs.
While these aren't really user-facing, they should illustrate good
practice not faulty practice.
Shinya Kato
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/524fa2c0a34f34b68fbfa90d0760d515@oss.nttdata.com
When determining whether an index update may be skipped by using HOT, we
can ignore attributes indexed only by BRIN indexes. There are no index
pointers to individual tuples in BRIN, and the page range summary will
be updated anyway as it relies on visibility info.
This also removes rd_indexattr list, and replaces it with rd_attrsvalid
flag. The list was not used anywhere, and a simple flag is sufficient.
Patch by Josef Simanek, various fixes and improvements by me.
Author: Josef Simanek
Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra, Alvaro Herrera
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFp7QwpMRGcDAQumN7onN9HjrJ3u4X3ZRXdGFT0K5G2JWvnbWg%40mail.gmail.com
Standardize on xoroshiro128** as our basic PRNG algorithm, eliminating
a bunch of platform dependencies as well as fundamentally-obsolete PRNG
code. In addition, this API replacement will ease replacing the
algorithm again in future, should that become necessary.
xoroshiro128** is a few percent slower than the drand48 family,
but it can produce full-width 64-bit random values not only 48-bit,
and it should be much more trustworthy. It's likely to be noticeably
faster than the platform's random(), depending on which platform you
are thinking about; and we can have non-global state vectors easily,
unlike with random(). It is not cryptographically strong, but neither
are the functions it replaces.
Fabien Coelho, reviewed by Dean Rasheed, Aleksander Alekseev, and myself
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/alpine.DEB.2.22.394.2105241211230.165418@pseudo
The five modules in our TAP test framework all had names in the top
level namespace. This is unwise because, even though we're not
exporting them to CPAN, the names can leak, for example if they are
exported by the RPM build process. We therefore move the modules to the
PostgreSQL::Test namespace. In the process PostgresNode is renamed to
Cluster, and TestLib is renamed to Utils. PostgresVersion becomes simply
PostgreSQL::Version, to avoid possible confusion about what it's the
version of.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/aede93a4-7d92-ef26-398f-5094944c2504@dunslane.net
Reviewed by Erik Rijkers and Michael Paquier
For non-MSVC builds this is make's $(CURDIR), while for MSVC builds it
is $topdir/$Config/$module. The directory is added as the second element
in the PATH, so that the install location takes precedence, but the
added PATH element takes precedence over the rest of the PATH.
The reason for this is to allow tests to find built products that are
not installed, such as the libpq_pipeline test driver.
The libpq_pipeline test is adjusted to take advantage of this.
Based on a suggestion from Andres Freund.
Backpatch to release 14.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/4941f5a5-2d50-1a0e-6701-14c5fefe92d6@dunslane.net
Do not update shm_mq's mq_bytes_written until we have written
an amount of data greater than 1/4th of the ring size, unless
the caller of shm_mq_send(v) requests a flush at the end of
the message. This reduces the number of calls to SetLatch(),
and also the number of CPU cache misses, considerably, and thus
makes shm_mq significantly faster.
Dilip Kumar, reviewed by Zhihong Yu and Tomas Vondra. Some
minor cosmetic changes by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAFiTN-tVXqn_OG7tHNeSkBbN+iiCZTiQ83uakax43y1sQb2OBA@mail.gmail.com
The previous approach didn't really work on windows, due to the PATH separator
being ';' not ':'. Instead of making the PATH change more complicated,
reference the binary using the TESTDIR environment.
Reported-By: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Suggested-By: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20210930214040.odkdd42vknvzifm6@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 14-, where the test was introduced.
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
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