Re: Yet another fast GiST build

On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 2:52 PM Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi> wrote:
> I'm not sure I understand. It's true that the raw page image can contain
> data from a different index, or any garbage really. And the function
> will behave badly if you do that. That's an accepted risk with
> pageinspect functions, that's why they're superuser-only, although some
> of them are more tolerant of corrupt pages than others. The
> gist_page_items_bytea() variant doesn't try to parse the key data and is
> less likely to crash on bad input.

I personally agree with you - it's not like there aren't other ways
for superusers to crash the server (most of which seem very similar to
this gist_page_items() issue, in fact). I just think that it's worth
being clear about that being a trade-off that we've accepted.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan