To generate btree-indexable conditions from regex WHERE conditions (such as
WHERE indexed_col ~ '^foo'), we need to be able to identify any fixed
prefix that a regex might have; that is, find any string that must be a
prefix of all strings satisfying the regex. We used to do that with
entirely ad-hoc code that looked at the source text of the regex. It
didn't know very much about regex syntax, which mostly meant that it would
fail to identify some optimizable cases; but Viktor Rosenfeld reported that
it would produce actively wrong answers for quantified parenthesized
subexpressions, such as '^(foo)?bar'. Rather than trying to extend the
ad-hoc code to cover this, let's get rid of it altogether in favor of
identifying prefixes by examining the compiled form of a regex.
To do this, I've added a new entry point "pg_regprefix" to the regex library;
hopefully it is defined in a sufficiently general fashion that it can remain
in the library when/if that code gets split out as a standalone project.
Since this bug has been there for a very long time, this fix needs to get
back-patched. However it depends on some other recent commits (particularly
the addition of wchar-to-database-encoding conversion), so I'll commit this
separately and then go to work on back-porting the necessary fixes.
The previous coding abused the first element of a cNFA state's arcs list
to hold a per-state flag bit, which was confusing, undocumented, and not
even particularly efficient. Get rid of that in favor of a separate
"stflags" vector. Since there's only one bit in use, I chose to allocate a
char per state; we could possibly replace this with a bitmap at some point,
but that would make accesses a little slower. It's already about 8X
smaller than before, so let's not get overly tense.
Also document the representation better than it was before, which is to say
not at all.
This patch is a byproduct of investigations towards extracting a "fixed
prefix" string from the compact-NFA representation of regex patterns.
Might need to back-patch it if we decide to back-patch that fix, but for
now it's just code cleanup so I'll just put it in HEAD.
In nested sub-regex trees, lower-level nodes created DFAs and then
destroyed them again before exiting, which is a bit dumb considering that
the recursive search is likely to call those nodes again later. Instead
cache each created DFA until the end of pg_regexec(). This is basically a
space for time tradeoff, in that it might increase the maximum memory
usage. However, in most regex patterns there are not all that many subre
nodes, so not that many DFAs --- and in any case, the peak usage occurs
when reaching the bottom recursion level, and except for alternation cases
that's going to be the same anyway.
Apparently some primordial version of Spencer's engine needed cdissect()
and child functions to be able to continue matching from a previous
position when re-called. That is dead code, though, since trivial
inspection shows that cdissect can never be entered without having
previously done zapmem which resets the relevant retry counter. I have
also verified experimentally that no case in the Tcl regression tests
reaches cdissect with a nonzero retry value. Accordingly, remove that
logic. This doesn't really save any noticeable number of cycles in itself,
but it is one step towards making dissect() and cdissect() equivalent,
which will allow removing hundreds of lines of near-duplicated code.
Since struct subre's "retry" field is no longer particularly related to
any kind of retry, rename it to "id". As of this commit it's only used
for identifying a subre node in debug printouts, so you might think we
should get rid of the field entirely; but I have a plan for another use.
Cases where a back-reference is part of a larger subexpression that
is quantified have never worked in Spencer's regex engine, because
he used a compile-time transformation that neglected the need to
check the back-reference match in iterations before the last one.
(That was okay for capturing parens, and we still do it if the
regex has *only* capturing parens ... but it's not okay for backrefs.)
To make this work properly, we have to add an "iteration" node type
to the regex engine's vocabulary of sub-regex nodes. Since this is a
moderately large change with a fair risk of introducing new bugs of its
own, apply to HEAD only, even though it's a fix for a longstanding bug.
Create src/backend/regex/README to hold an implementation overview of
the regex package, and fill it in with some preliminary notes about
the code's DFA/NFA processing and colormap management. Much more to
do there of course.
Also, improve some code comments around the colormap and cvec code.
No functional changes except to add one missing assert.
was Tcl 8.4.8. The main changes are to remove the never-fully-implemented
code for multi-character collating elements, and to const-ify some stuff a
bit more fully. In combination with the recent security patch, this commit
brings us into line with Tcl 8.5.0.
Note that I didn't make any effort to duplicate a lot of cosmetic changes
that they made to bring their copy into line with their own style
guidelines, such as adding braces around single-line IF bodies. Most of
those we either had done already (such as ANSI-fication of function headers)
or there is no point because pgindent would undo the change anyway.
are shared with Tcl, since it's their code to begin with, and the patches
have been copied from Tcl 8.5.0. Problems:
CVE-2007-4769: Inadequate check on the range of backref numbers allows
crash due to out-of-bounds read.
CVE-2007-4772: Infinite loop in regex optimizer for pattern '($|^)*'.
CVE-2007-6067: Very slow optimizer cleanup for regex with a large NFA
representation, as well as crash if we encounter an out-of-memory condition
during NFA construction.
Part of the response to CVE-2007-6067 is to put a limit on the number of
states in the NFA representation of a regex. This seems needed even though
the within-the-code problems have been corrected, since otherwise the code
could try to use very large amounts of memory for a suitably-crafted regex,
leading to potential DOS by driving the system into swap, activating a kernel
OOM killer, etc.
Although there are certainly plenty of ways to drive the system into effective
DOS with poorly-written SQL queries, these problems seem worth treating as
security issues because many applications might accept regex search patterns
from untrustworthy sources.
Thanks to Will Drewry of Google for reporting these problems. Patches by Will
Drewry and Tom Lane.
Security: CVE-2007-4769, CVE-2007-4772, CVE-2007-6067
(extracted from Tcl 8.4.1 release, as Henry still hasn't got round to
making it a separate library). This solves a performance problem for
multibyte, as well as upgrading our regexp support to match recent Tcl
and nearly match recent Perl.
