CVE-2019-9193

There's a new article out in Computer Weekly talking about CVE-2019-9193. The PostgreSQL project has issued a statement saying that this is not a security vulnerability, and PostgreSQL core team member Magnus Hagander also wrote a blog about it, saying the same thing. If you're curious about this issue, I suggest reading not only what Magnus wrote but also the comments section of that blog post, where you can see some of the perspectives that other people have on what Magnus said. But, in this blog post, I'd like to comment a bit on what is said in the Computer Weekly article: is there any truth to the allegations offered there?

Don't Manually Modify The PostgreSQL Data Directory!

I was lucky enough to get a chance to give my talk Avoiding, Detecting, and Recovering From Data Corruption at PGCONF.IN in February, before everything got shut down. The conference organizers did an amazing job with the video, which shows both me speaking and the slides I was presenting side by side. That's the first time a PostgreSQL conference has done the video that way, and I love it. One of the points that I raised in that talk was that you should not manually modify the contents of the PostgreSQL data directory in any way. To my surprise, the most frequent question that I was asked after giving the talk was "Really? What if I do XYZ?"

Who Contributed to PostgreSQL Development in 2019?

This is my fourth annual post on who contributes to PostgreSQL development. See previous posts in this series for methodology. I calculate that this year, 189 people were primary authors of at least one PostgreSQL commit. 37 of those people accounted for 90% of the new lines, and 12 people accounted for 66% of the new lines. In total, there were 2127 commits by 26 committers. The work of committing patches written by someone other than the committer was principally shared by 5 committers who committed 66% of the lines of non-self-authored code; 10 committers accounted for 90% of the lines of non-self-authored code.

Useless Vacuuming

In previous blog posts that I've written about VACUUM, and I seem to be accumulating an uncomfortable number of those, I've talked about various things that can go wrong with vacuum, but one that I haven't really covered is when autovacuum seems to be running totally normally but you still have a VACUUM problem. In this blog post, I'd like to talk about how to recognize that situation, how to figure out what has caused it, how to avoid it via good monitoring, and how to recover if it happens.

Contributors Team, Redux

Last summer, in a burst of sunny optimism and out of a desire for transparency, I posted a blog post about the then-new PostgreSQL Contributors Team, which was charged with updating the contributors page as required. Having now been on this mailing list for 7 months or so, I have a few - actually quite a few - comments about the whole problem space.