• Tom Lane's avatar
    Avoid misbehavior when persisting a non-stable cursor. · ba2c6d6c
    Tom Lane authored
    PersistHoldablePortal has long assumed that it should store the
    entire output of the query-to-be-persisted, which requires rewinding
    and re-reading the output.  This is problematic if the query is not
    stable: we might get different row contents, or even a different
    number of rows, which'd confuse the cursor state mightily.
    
    In the case where the cursor is NO SCROLL, this is very easy to
    solve: just store the remaining query output, without any rewinding,
    and tweak the portal's cursor state to match.  Aside from removing
    the semantic problem, this could be significantly more efficient
    than storing the whole output.
    
    If the cursor is scrollable, there's not much we can do, but it
    was already the case that scrolling a volatile query's result was
    pretty unsafe.  We can just document more clearly that getting
    correct results from that is not guaranteed.
    
    There are already prohibitions in place on using SCROLL with
    FOR UPDATE/SHARE, which is one way for a SELECT query to have
    non-stable results.  We could imagine prohibiting SCROLL when
    the query contains volatile functions, but that would be
    expensive to enforce.  Moreover, it could break applications
    that work just fine, if they have functions that are in fact
    stable but the user neglected to mark them so.  So settle for
    documenting the hazard.
    
    While this problem has existed in some guise for a long time,
    it got a lot worse in v11, which introduced the possibility
    of persisting plpgsql cursors (perhaps implicit ones) even
    when they violate the rules for what can be marked WITH HOLD.
    Hence, I've chosen to back-patch to v11 but not further.
    
    Per bug #17050 from Алексей Булгаков.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/17050-f77aa827dc85247c@postgresql.org
    ba2c6d6c
declare.sgml 13.5 KB