• Tom Lane's avatar
    Flatten join alias Vars before pulling up targetlist items from a subquery. · f19e92ed
    Tom Lane authored
    pullup_replace_vars()'s decisions about whether a pulled-up replacement
    expression needs to be wrapped in a PlaceHolderVar depend on the assumption
    that what looks like a Var behaves like a Var.  However, if the Var is a
    join alias reference, later flattening of join aliases might replace the
    Var with something that's not a Var at all, and should have been wrapped.
    
    To fix, do a forcible pass of flatten_join_alias_vars() on the subquery
    targetlist before we start to copy items out of it.  We'll re-run that
    processing on the pulled-up expressions later, but that's harmless.
    
    Per report from Ken Tanzer; the added regression test case is based on his
    example.  This bug has been there since the PlaceHolderVar mechanism was
    invented, but has escaped detection because the circumstances that trigger
    it are fairly narrow.  You need a flattenable query underneath an outer
    join, which contains another flattenable query inside a join of its own,
    with a dangerous expression (a constant or something else non-strict)
    in that one's targetlist.
    
    Having seen this, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be prudent to do all
    alias-variable flattening earlier, perhaps even in the rewriter.
    But that would probably not be a back-patchable change.
    f19e92ed
join.out 135 KB