Hi, On 2018-10-17 13:14:17 -0400, James Coleman wrote: > > It's far from only toast that could be problematic here. > > > > Do you have an example in mind? Wouldn’t the tuples have to be corrupted in > some way to have problems with being interpreted as a datum? Or are you > thinking very old tuples with a radically different structure to be causing > the problem?
There's plenty ways it can go horribly wrong. Let's start with something simple: BEGIN; ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN blarg INT; INSERT ... (blag) VALUES (132467890); ROLLBACK; ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN blarg TEXT; If you now read the table with your function you'll see a dead row that will re-interpret a int datum as a text datum. Which in all likelyhood will crash the server. And yes, it's more likely to break with your patch, but I think the current *split* function is dangerous too, and shouldn't have been added without *A LOT* more attention to issues like this. Greetings, Andres Freund
