Commit 8c8ba6d1 authored by Tom Lane's avatar Tom Lane

Add comment on why pulling data from a "name" index column can't crash.

It's been bothering me for several days that pretending that the cstring
data stored in a btree name_ops column is really a "name" Datum could lead
to reading past the end of memory.  However, given the current memory
layout used for index-only scans in the btree code, a crash is in fact not
possible.  Document that so we don't break it.  I have not thought of any
other solutions that aren't fairly ugly too, and most of them lose the
functionality of index-only scans on name columns altogether, so this seems
like the way to go.
parent cb6771fb
......@@ -433,6 +433,16 @@ btrescan(PG_FUNCTION_ARGS)
* not already done in a previous rescan call. To save on palloc
* overhead, both workspaces are allocated as one palloc block; only this
* function and btendscan know that.
*
* NOTE: this data structure also makes it safe to return data from a
* "name" column, even though btree name_ops uses an underlying storage
* datatype of cstring. The risk there is that "name" is supposed to be
* padded to NAMEDATALEN, but the actual index tuple is probably shorter.
* However, since we only return data out of tuples sitting in the
* currTuples array, a fetch of NAMEDATALEN bytes can at worst pull some
* data out of the markTuples array --- running off the end of memory for
* a SIGSEGV is not possible. Yeah, this is ugly as sin, but it beats
* adding special-case treatment for name_ops elsewhere.
*/
if (scan->xs_want_itup && so->currTuples == NULL)
{
......
Markdown is supported
0% or
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment