Disallow null category in crosstab_hash

While building a hash map of categories in load_categories_hash,
resulting category names have not thus far been checked to ensure
they are not null. Prior to pg12 null category names worked to the
extent that they did not crash on some platforms. This is because
those system libraries have an snprintf which can deal with being
passed a null pointer argument for a string. But even in those cases
null categories did nothing useful. And on some platforms it crashed.
As of pg12, our own version of snprintf gets called, and it does
not deal with null pointer arguments at all, and crashes consistently.

Fix that by disallowing null categories. They never worked usefully,
and no one has ever asked for them to work previously. Back-patch to
all supported branches.

Reported-By: Ireneusz Pluta
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16176-7489719b05e4303c@postgresql.org

diff --git a/contrib/tablefunc/tablefunc.c b/contrib/tablefunc/tablefunc.c
index 256d52fc6291486515ee1f682fb63e1f30bdd566..1072827784fe5709fc36c58359c08187bcd98079 100644 (file)
--- a/contrib/tablefunc/tablefunc.c
+++ b/contrib/tablefunc/tablefunc.c
@@ -762,6 +762,11 @@ load_categories_hash(char *cats_sql, MemoryContext per_query_ctx)
 
            /* get the category from the current sql result tuple */
            catname = SPI_getvalue(spi_tuple, spi_tupdesc, 1);
+           if (catname == NULL)
+               ereport(ERROR,
+                       (errcode(ERRCODE_SYNTAX_ERROR),
+                        errmsg("provided \"categories\" SQL must " \
+                               "not return NULL values")));
 
            SPIcontext = MemoryContextSwitchTo(per_query_ctx);