subquery_planner() failed to apply expression preprocessing to the
arbiterElems and arbiterWhere fields of an OnConflictExpr. No doubt the
theory was that this wasn't necessary because we don't actually try to
execute those expressions; but that's wrong, because it results in failure
to match to index expressions or index predicates that are changed at all
by preprocessing. Per bug #14132 from Reynold Smith.
Also add pullup_replace_vars processing for onConflictWhere. Perhaps
it's impossible to have a subquery reference there, but I'm not exactly
convinced; and even if true today it's a failure waiting to happen.
Also add some comments to other places where one or another field of
OnConflictExpr is intentionally ignored, with explanation as to why it's
okay to do so.
Also, catalog/dependency.c failed to record any dependency on the named
constraint in ON CONFLICT ON CONSTRAINT, allowing such a constraint to
be dropped while rules exist that depend on it, and allowing pg_dump to
dump such a rule before the constraint it refers to. The normal execution
path managed to error out reasonably for a dangling constraint reference,
but ruleutils.c dumped core; so in addition to fixing the omission, add
a protective check in ruleutils.c, since we can't retroactively add a
dependency in existing databases.
Back-patch to 9.5 where this code was introduced.
Report: <20160510190350.2608.48667@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
The table-skipping logic in autovacuum would fail to consider that
multiple workers could be processing the same shared catalog in
different databases. This normally wouldn't be a problem: firstly
because autovacuum workers not for wraparound would simply ignore tables
in which they cannot acquire lock, and secondly because most of the time
these tables are small enough that even if multiple for-wraparound
workers are stuck in the same catalog, they would be over pretty
quickly. But in cases where the catalogs are severely bloated it could
become a problem.
Backpatch all the way back, because the problem has been there since the
beginning.
Reported by Ondřej Světlík
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/572B63B1.3030603%40flexibee.euhttps://www.postgresql.org/message-id/572A1072.5080308%40flexibee.eu
In the documentation for nextval(), point out explicitly that INSERT ...
ON CONFLICT will call nextval() if needed for the insertion case, whether
or not it ends up following the ON CONFLICT path. This seems to be a
matter of some confusion, cf bug #14126, so let's be clear about it.
Also mention the issue in the CREATE SEQUENCE reference page, since that
is another place where people might expect such things to be covered.
Minor wording improvements nearby, as well.
Back-patch to 9.5 where ON CONFLICT was introduced.
OpenSSL has an unfortunate tendency to mix per-session state error
handling with per-thread error handling. This can cause problems when
programs that link to libpq with OpenSSL enabled have some other use of
OpenSSL; without care, one caller of OpenSSL may cause problems for the
other caller. Backend code might similarly be affected, for example
when a third party extension independently uses OpenSSL without taking
the appropriate precautions.
To fix, don't trust other users of OpenSSL to clear the per-thread error
queue. Instead, clear the entire per-thread queue ahead of certain I/O
operations when it appears that there might be trouble (these I/O
operations mostly need to call SSL_get_error() to check for success,
which relies on the queue being empty). This is slightly aggressive,
but it's pretty clear that the other callers have a very dubious claim
to ownership of the per-thread queue. Do this is both frontend and
backend code.
Finally, be more careful about clearing our own error queue, so as to
not cause these problems ourself. It's possibly that control previously
did not always reach SSLerrmessage(), where ERR_get_error() was supposed
to be called to clear the queue's earliest code. Make sure
ERR_get_error() is always called, so as to spare other users of OpenSSL
the possibility of similar problems caused by libpq (as opposed to
problems caused by a third party OpenSSL library like PHP's OpenSSL
extension). Again, do this is both frontend and backend code.
See bug #12799 and https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=68276
Based on patches by Dave Vitek and Peter Eisentraut.
From: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
This patch essentially reverts commit 4c6780fd17, in favor of a much
simpler solution for the case where the new cluster would choose to create
a TOAST table but the old cluster doesn't have one: just don't create a
TOAST table.
The existing code failed in at least two different ways if the situation
arose: (1) ALTER TABLE RESET didn't grab an exclusive lock, so that the
lock sanity check in create_toast_table failed; (2) pg_upgrade did not
provide a pg_type OID for the new toast table, so that the crosscheck in
TypeCreate failed. While both these problems were introduced by later
patches, they show that the hack being used to cause TOAST table creation
is overwhelmingly fragile (and untested). I also note that before the
TypeCreate crosscheck was added, the code would have resulted in assigning
an indeterminate pg_type OID to the toast table, possibly causing a later
OID conflict in that catalog; so that it didn't really work even when
committed.
If we simply don't create a TOAST table, there will only be a problem if
the code tries to store a tuple that's wider than a page, and field
compression isn't sufficient to get it under a page. Given that the TOAST
creation threshold is intended to be about a quarter of a page, it's very
hard to believe that cross-version differences in the do-we-need-a-toast-
table heuristic could result in an observable problem. So let's just
follow the old version's conclusion about whether a TOAST table is needed.
(If we ever do change needs_toast_table() so much that this conclusion
doesn't apply, we can devise a solution at that time, and hopefully do
it in a less klugy way than 4c6780fd17 did.)
Back-patch to 9.3, like the previous patch.
Discussion: <8110.1462291671@sss.pgh.pa.us>
to_timestamp() handles the TH/th format codes by advancing over two input
characters, whatever those are. It failed to notice whether there were
two characters available to be skipped, making it possible to advance
the pointer past the end of the input string and keep on parsing.
A similar risk existed in the handling of "Y,YYY" format: it would advance
over three characters after the "," whether or not three characters were
available.
In principle this might be exploitable to disclose contents of server
memory. But the security team concluded that it would be very hard to use
that way, because the parsing loop would stop upon hitting any zero byte,
and TH/th format codes can't be consecutive --- they have to follow some
other format code, which would have to match whatever data is there.
So it seems impractical to examine memory very much beyond the end of the
input string via this bug; and the input string will always be in local
memory not in disk buffers, making it unlikely that anything very
interesting is close to it in a predictable way. So this doesn't quite
rise to the level of needing a CVE.
Thanks to Wolf Roediger for reporting this bug.
DST law changes in Russia (Magadan, Tomsk regions) and Venezuela.
Historical corrections for Russia. There are new zone names Europe/Kirov
and Asia/Tomsk reflecting the fact that these regions now have different
time zone histories from adjacent regions.
Somebody added pg_replication_origin, pg_replication_origin_status and
pg_replication_slots to catalogs.sgml without a whole lot of concern for
either alphabetical order or the difference between a table and a view.
Clean up the mess.
Back-patch to 9.5, not so much because this is critical as because if
I don't it will result in a cross-branch divergence in release-9.5.sgml,
which would be a maintenance hazard.
awk's equality-comparison operator is "==" not "=". We got this right
in many places, but not in configure's checks for supported version
numbers of flex and perl. It hadn't been noticed because unsupported
versions are so old as to be basically extinct in the wild, and because
the only consequence is whether or not a WARNING flies by during
configure.
Daniel Gustafsson noted the problem with respect to the test for flex,
I found the other by reviewing other awk calls.
CHECK_PAGE_OFFSET_RANGE() has been unused forever.
CHECK_RELATION_BLOCK_RANGE() has been unused in pgstatindex.c ever since
bt_page_stats() and bt_page_items() functions were moved from pgstattuple
to pageinspect module. It still exists in pageinspect/btreefuncs.c.
Daniel Gustafsson
Given a three-or-more-way equivalence class, such as X.Y = Y.Y = Z.Z,
it was possible for the planner to omit one of the quals needed to
enforce that all members of the equivalence class are actually equal.
This only happened in the case of a parameterized join node for two
of the relations, that is a plan tree like
Nested Loop
-> Scan X
-> Nested Loop
-> Scan Y
-> Scan Z
Filter: Z.Z = X.X
The eclass machinery normally expects to apply X.X = Y.Y when those
two relations are joined, but in this shape of plan tree they aren't
joined until the top node --- and, if the lower nested loop is marked
as parameterized by X, the top node will assume that the relevant eclass
condition(s) got pushed down into the lower node. On the other hand,
the scan of Z assumes that it's only responsible for constraining Z.Z
to match any one of the other eclass members. So one or another of
the required quals sometimes fell between the cracks, depending on
whether consideration of the eclass in get_joinrel_parampathinfo()
for the lower nested loop chanced to generate X.X = Y.Y or X.X = Z.Z
as the appropriate constraint there. If it generated the latter,
it'd erroneously suppose that the Z scan would take care of matters.
To fix, force X.X = Y.Y to be generated and applied at that join node
when this case occurs.
This is *extremely* hard to hit in practice, because various planner
behaviors conspire to mask the problem; starting with the fact that the
planner doesn't really like to generate a parameterized plan of the
above shape. (It might have been impossible to hit it before we
tweaked things to allow this plan shape for star-schema cases.) Many
thanks to Alexander Kirkouski for submitting a reproducible test case.
The bug can be demonstrated in all branches back to 9.2 where parameterized
paths were introduced, so back-patch that far.
Adjust the way we detect the locale. As a result the minumum Windows
version supported by VS2015 and later is Windows Vista. Add some tweaks
to remove new compiler warnings. Remove documentation references to the
now obsolete msysGit.
Michael Paquier, somewhat edited by me, reviewed by Christian Ullrich.
Backpatch to 9.5
Since 5a991ef8 we're explicitly asking for feedback from the receiving
side when shutting down walsender, if there's not yet replicated
data.
Unfortunately we didn't remember (i.e. set waiting_for_ping_response to
true) having asked for feedback, leading to scenarios in which replies
were requested at a high frequency.
I can't reproduce this problem on my laptop, I think that's because the
problem requires a significant TCP window to manifest due to the
!pq_is_send_pending() condition. But since this clearly is a bug, let's
fix it. There's quite possibly more wrong than just this though.
While fiddling with WalSndDone(), I rewrote a hard to understand comment
about looking at the flush vs. the write position.
Reported-By: Nick Cleaton, Magnus Hagander
Author: Nick Cleaton
Discussion: CAFgz3kus=rC_avEgBV=+hRK5HYJ8vXskJRh8yEAbahJGTzF2VQ@mail.gmail.comCABUevExsjROqDcD0A2rnJ6HK6FuKGyewJr3PL12pw85BHFGS2Q@mail.gmail.com
Backpatch: 9.4, were 5a991ef8 introduced the use of feedback messages
during shutdown.
Commit 23a41573c attempted to fix the DatumGetBool macro to ignore bits
in a Datum that are to the left of the actual bool value. But it did that
by casting the Datum to bool; and on compilers that use C99 semantics for
bool, that ends up being a whole-word test, not a 1-byte test. This seems
to be the true explanation for contrib/seg failing in VS2015. To fix, use
GET_1_BYTE() explicitly. I think in the previous patch, I'd had some idea
of not having to commit to bool being exactly 1 byte wide, but regardless
of what the compiler's bool is, boolean columns and Datums are certainly
1 byte wide.
The previous fix was (eventually) back-patched into all active versions,
so do likewise with this one.
This reverts commit b1dd2f86ce.
That turns out to have been based on a faulty diagnosis of why the
VS2015 build was misbehaving. Instead, we need to fix DatumGetBool().
pg_atomic_compare_exchange_*_impl() were providing only the semantics of
an acquire barrier. Buildfarm members hornet and mandrill revealed this
deficit beginning with commit 008608b9d5.
While we have no report of symptoms in 9.5, we can't rule out the
possibility of certain compilers, hardware, or extension code relying on
these functions' specified barrier semantics. Back-patch to 9.5, where
commit b64d92f1a5 introduced atomics.
Reviewed by Andres Freund.
NetBSD has seen fit to invent a libc function named strtoi(), which
conflicts with the long-established static functions of the same name in
datetime.c and ecpg's interval.c. While muttering darkly about intrusions
on application namespace, we'll rename our functions to avoid the conflict.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since this would affect attempts
to build any of them on recent NetBSD.
Thomas Munro
It appears that we can no longer get away with using V0 call convention
for bool-returning functions in newer versions of MSVC. The compiler
seems to generate code that doesn't clear the higher-order bits of the
result register, causing the bool result Datum to often read as "true"
when "false" was intended. This is not very surprising, since the
function thinks it's returning a bool-width result but fmgr_oldstyle
assumes that V0 functions return "char *"; what's surprising is that
that hack worked for so long on so many platforms.
The only functions of this description in core+contrib are in contrib/seg,
which we'd intentionally left mostly in V0 style to serve as a warning
canary if V0 call convention breaks. We could imagine hacking things
so that they're still V0 (we'd have to redeclare the bool-returning
functions as returning some suitably wide integer type, like size_t,
at the C level). But on the whole it seems better to convert 'em to V1.
We can still leave the pointer- and int-returning functions in V0 style,
so that the test coverage isn't gone entirely.
Back-patch to 9.5, since our intention is to support VS2015 in 9.5
and later. There's no SQL-level change in the functions' behavior
so back-patching should be safe enough.
Discussion: <22094.1461273324@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Michael Paquier, adjusted some by me
The implementation of that feature involves injecting nodes into the
raw parsetree where explicit parentheses appear. Various places in
parse_expr.c that test to see "is this child node of type Foo" need to
look through such nodes, else we'll get different behavior when
operator_precedence_warning is on than when it is off. Note that we only
need to handle this when testing untransformed child nodes, since the
AEXPR_PAREN nodes will be gone anyway after transformExprRecurse.
Per report from Scott Ribe and additional code-reading. Back-patch
to 9.5 where this feature was added.
Report: <ED37E303-1B0A-4CD8-8E1E-B9C4C2DD9A17@elevated-dev.com>
Given a left join containing a full join in its righthand side, with
the left join's joinclause referencing only one side of the full join
(in a non-strict fashion, so that the full join doesn't get simplified),
the planner could fail with "failed to build any N-way joins" or related
errors. This happened because the full join was seen as overlapping the
left join's RHS, and then recent changes within join_is_legal() caused
that function to conclude that the full join couldn't validly be formed.
Rather than try to rejigger join_is_legal() yet more to allow this,
I think it's better to fix initsplan.c so that the required join order
is explicit in the SpecialJoinInfo data structure. The previous coding
there essentially ignored full joins, relying on the fact that we don't
flatten them in the joinlist data structure to preserve their ordering.
That's sufficient to prevent a wrong plan from being formed, but as this
example shows, it's not sufficient to ensure that the right plan will
be formed. We need to work a bit harder to ensure that the right plan
looks sane according to the SpecialJoinInfos.
Per bug #14105 from Vojtech Rylko. This was apparently induced by
commit 8703059c6 (though now that I've seen it, I wonder whether there
are related cases that could have failed before that); so back-patch
to all active branches. Unfortunately, that patch also went into 9.0,
so this bug is a regression that won't be fixed in that branch.
The coverage was rather lean for cases that bind() or listen() might
return. Add entries for everything that there's a direct equivalent
for in the set of Unix errnos that elog.c has heard of.
There's no longer a need for the MSVC-version-specific code stanza that
forcibly redefines errno code symbols, because since commit 73838b52 we're
unconditionally redefining them in the stanza before this one anyway.
Now it's merely confusing and ugly, so get rid of it; and improve the
comment that explains what's going on here.
Although this is just cosmetic, back-patch anyway since I'm intending
to back-patch some less-cosmetic changes in this same hunk of code.
Fix Windows builds to report something useful rather than "could not bind
IPv4 socket: No error" when bind() fails.
Back-patch of commits d1b7d4877b and 22989a8e34.
Discussion: <4065.1452450340@sss.pgh.pa.us>
When we shoehorned "x op ANY (array)" into the SQL syntax, we created a
fundamental ambiguity as to the proper treatment of a sub-SELECT on the
righthand side: perhaps what's meant is to compare x against each row of
the sub-SELECT's result, or perhaps the sub-SELECT is meant as a scalar
sub-SELECT that delivers a single array value whose members should be
compared against x. The grammar resolves it as the former case whenever
the RHS is a select_with_parens, making the latter case hard to reach ---
but you can get at it, with tricks such as attaching a no-op cast to the
sub-SELECT. Parse analysis would throw away the no-op cast, leaving a
parsetree with an EXPR_SUBLINK SubLink directly under a ScalarArrayOpExpr.
ruleutils.c was not clued in on this fine point, and would naively emit
"x op ANY ((SELECT ...))", which would be parsed as the first alternative,
typically leading to errors like "operator does not exist: text = text[]"
during dump/reload of a view or rule containing such a construct. To fix,
emit a no-op cast when dumping such a parsetree. This might well be
exactly what the user wrote to get the construct accepted in the first
place; and even if she got there with some other dodge, it is a valid
representation of the parsetree.
Per report from Karl Czajkowski. He mentioned only a case involving
RLS policies, but actually the problem is very old, so back-patch to
all supported branches.
Report: <20160421001832.GB7976@moraine.isi.edu>
In commit 2ffa869620 we made pg_ctl recognize an environment variable
PGCTLTIMEOUT to set the default timeout for starting and stopping the
postmaster. However, pg_regress uses pg_ctl only for the "stop" end of
that; it has bespoke code for starting the postmaster, and that code has
historically had a hard-wired 60-second timeout. Further buildfarm
experience says it'd be a good idea if that timeout were also controlled
by PGCTLTIMEOUT, so let's make it so. Like the previous patch, back-patch
to all active branches.
Discussion: <13969.1461191936@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Commit 36a35c550a turned the interface between ginPlaceToPage and
its subroutines in gindatapage.c and ginentrypage.c into a royal mess:
page-update critical sections were started in one place and finished in
another place not even in the same file, and the very same subroutine
might return having started a critical section or not. Subsequent patches
band-aided over some of the problems with this design by making things
even messier.
One user-visible resulting problem is memory leaks caused by the need for
the subroutines to allocate storage that would survive until ginPlaceToPage
calls XLogInsert (as reported by Julien Rouhaud). This would not typically
be noticeable during retail index updates. It could be visible in a GIN
index build, in the form of memory consumption swelling to several times
the commanded maintenance_work_mem.
Another rather nasty problem is that in the internal-page-splitting code
path, we would clear the child page's GIN_INCOMPLETE_SPLIT flag well before
entering the critical section that it's supposed to be cleared in; a
failure in between would leave the index in a corrupt state. There were
also assorted coding-rule violations with little immediate consequence but
possible long-term hazards, such as beginning an XLogInsert sequence before
entering a critical section, or calling elog(DEBUG) inside a critical
section.
To fix, redefine the API between ginPlaceToPage() and its subroutines
by splitting the subroutines into two parts. The "beginPlaceToPage"
subroutine does what can be done outside a critical section, including
full computation of the result pages into temporary storage when we're
going to split the target page. The "execPlaceToPage" subroutine is called
within a critical section established by ginPlaceToPage(), and it handles
the actual page update in the non-split code path. The critical section,
as well as the XLOG insertion call sequence, are both now always started
and finished in ginPlaceToPage(). Also, make ginPlaceToPage() create and
work in a short-lived memory context to eliminate the leakage problem.
(Since a short-lived memory context had been getting created in the most
common code path in the subroutines, this shouldn't cause any noticeable
performance penalty; we're just moving the overhead up one call level.)
In passing, fix a bunch of comments that had gone unmaintained throughout
all this klugery.
Report: <571276DD.5050303@dalibo.com>
Per discussion, there doesn't seem to be much value in having
NUM_SPINLOCK_SEMAPHORES set to 1024: under any scenario where you are
running more than a few backends concurrently, you really had better have a
real spinlock implementation if you want tolerable performance. And 1024
semaphores is a sizable fraction of the system-wide SysV semaphore limit
on many platforms. Therefore, reduce this setting's default value to 128
to make it less likely to cause out-of-semaphores problems.
Careless coding added by commit 07cacba983 could result in a crash
or a bizarre error message if someone tried to select an index on the
OID column as the replica identity index for a table. Back-patch to 9.4
where the feature was introduced.
Discussion: CAKJS1f8TQYgTRDyF1_u9PVCKWRWz+DkieH=U7954HeHVPJKaKg@mail.gmail.com
David Rowley
The code had a query-lifespan memory leak when encountering GIN entries
that have posting lists (rather than posting trees, ie, there are a
relatively small number of heap tuples containing this index key value).
With a suitable data distribution this could add up to a lot of leakage.
Problem seems to have been introduced by commit 36a35c550, so back-patch
to 9.4.
Julien Rouhaud
When re-reading an update involving both an old tuple and a new tuple from
disk, reorderbuffer.c was careless about whether the new tuple is suitably
aligned for direct access --- in general, it isn't. We'd missed seeing
this in the buildfarm because the contrib/test_decoding tests exercise this
code path only a few times, and by chance all of those cases have old
tuples with length a multiple of 4, which is usually enough to make the
access to the new tuple's t_len safe. For some still-not-entirely-clear
reason, however, Debian's sparc build gets a bus error, as reported by
Christoph Berg; perhaps it's assuming 8-byte alignment of the pointer?
The lack of previous field reports is probably because you need all of
these conditions to trigger a crash: an alignment-picky platform (not
Intel), a transaction large enough to spill to disk, an update within
that xact that changes a primary-key field and has an odd-length old tuple,
and of course logical decoding tracing the transaction.
Avoid the alignment assumption by using memcpy instead of fetching t_len
directly, and add a test case that exposes the crash on picky platforms.
Back-patch to 9.4 where the bug was introduced.
Discussion: <20160413094117.GC21485@msg.credativ.de>
It was declared as "pid_t", which would be fine except that none of
the places that printed it in error messages took any thought for the
possibility that it's not equivalent to "int". This leads to warnings
on some buildfarm members, and could possibly lead to actually wrong
error messages on those platforms. There doesn't seem to be any very
good reason not to just make it "int"; it's only ever assigned from
MyProcPid, which is int. If we want to cope with PIDs that are wider
than int, this is not the place to start.
Also, fix the comment, which seems to perhaps be a leftover from a time
when the field was only a bool?
Per buildfarm. Back-patch to 9.5 which has same issue.
As reported by Michael Feld, pg_upgrade'ing an installation having
extensions with operator families that contain just a single operator class
failed to reproduce the extension membership of those operator families.
This caused no immediate ill effects, but would create problems when later
trying to do a plain dump and restore, because the seemingly-not-part-of-
the-extension operator families would appear separately in the pg_dump
output, and then would conflict with the families created by loading the
extension. This has been broken ever since extensions were introduced,
and many of the standard contrib extensions are affected, so it's a bit
astonishing nobody complained before.
The cause of the problem is a perhaps-ill-considered decision to omit
such operator families from pg_dump's output on the grounds that the
CREATE OPERATOR CLASS commands could recreate them, and having explicit
CREATE OPERATOR FAMILY commands would impede loading the dump script into
pre-8.3 servers. Whatever the merits of that decision when 8.3 was being
written, it looks like a poor tradeoff now. We can fix the pg_upgrade
problem simply by removing that code, so that the operator families are
dumped explicitly (and then will be properly made to be part of their
extensions).
Although this fixes the behavior of future pg_upgrade runs, it does nothing
to clean up existing installations that may have improperly-linked operator
families. Given the small number of complaints to date, maybe we don't
need to worry about providing an automated solution for that; anyone who
needs to clean it up can do so with manual "ALTER EXTENSION ADD OPERATOR
FAMILY" commands, or even just ignore the duplicate-opfamily errors they
get during a pg_restore. In any case we need this fix.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Discussion: <20228.1460575691@sss.pgh.pa.us>
When IF NOT EXISTS was added to CREATE TABLE AS, this logic didn't get
the memo, possibly resulting in an Assert failure. It looks like there
would have been no ill effects in a non-Assert build, though. Back-patch
to 9.5 where the IF NOT EXISTS option was added.
Stas Kelvich
It turns out that those PyErr_Clear() calls I removed from plpy_elog.c
in 7e3bb08038 et al were not quite as random as they appeared: they
mask a Python 2.3.x bug. (Specifically, it turns out that PyType_Ready()
can fail if the error indicator is set on entry, and PLy_traceback's fetch
of frame.f_code may be the first operation in a session that requires the
"frame" type to be readied. Ick.) Put back the clear call, but in a more
centralized place closer to what it's protecting, and this time with a
comment warning what it's really for.
Per buildfarm member prairiedog. Although prairiedog was only failing
on HEAD, it seems clearly possible for this to occur in older branches
as well, so back-patch to 9.2 the same as the previous patch.
PLy_elog() could attempt to access strings that Python had already freed,
because the strings that PLy_get_spi_error_data() returns are simply
pointers into storage associated with the error "val" PyObject. That's
fine at the instant PLy_get_spi_error_data() returns them, but just after
that PLy_traceback() intentionally releases the only refcount on that
object, allowing it to be freed --- so that the strings we pass to
ereport() are dangling pointers.
In principle this could result in garbage output or a coredump. In
practice, I think the risk is pretty low, because there are no Python
operations between where we decrement that refcount and where we use the
strings (and copy them into PG storage), and thus no reason for Python
to recycle the storage. Still, it's clearly hazardous, and it leads to
Valgrind complaints when running under a Valgrind that hasn't been
lobotomized to ignore Python memory allocations.
The code was a mess anyway: we fetched the error data out of Python
(clearing Python's error indicator) with PyErr_Fetch, examined it, pushed
it back into Python with PyErr_Restore (re-setting the error indicator),
then immediately pulled it back out with another PyErr_Fetch. Just to
confuse matters even more, there were some gratuitous-and-yet-hazardous
PyErr_Clear calls in the "examine" step, and we didn't get around to doing
PyErr_NormalizeException until after the second PyErr_Fetch, making it even
less clear which object was being manipulated where and whether we still
had a refcount on it. (If PyErr_NormalizeException did substitute a
different "val" object, it's possible that the problem could manifest for
real, because then we'd be doing assorted Python stuff with no refcount
on the object we have string pointers into.)
So, rearrange all that into some semblance of sanity, and don't decrement
the refcount on the Python error objects until the end of PLy_elog().
In HEAD, I failed to resist the temptation to reformat some messy bits
from 5c3c3cd0a3 along the way.
Back-patch as far as 9.2, because the code is substantially the same
that far back. I believe that 9.1 has the bug as well; but the code
around it is rather different and I don't want to take a chance on
breaking something for what seems a low-probability problem.
Tom Lane