Re: Column type changed "spontanously"?

On 5/9/19 6:14 AM, Chuck Martin wrote:
> I have several columns that were created as "timestamp without time 
> zone", but I changed them in 2014 to "timestamp with time zone". 
> Recently, when I got notified that times had suddenly changed, I checked 
> and found the columns had reverted to "timestamp without time zone." 
> This seems impossible, yet it seems to have happened. Any ideas on what 
> could cause this? My application has the privileges to do this, as it 
> changed the data type to support time zones. But there is no code that 
> could change it back not to support time zones.
> 
> The database in on
> 
> "PostgreSQL 9.3.1 on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (GCC) 
> 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-3), 64-bit"
> 
> What other information would help solve this?

Following up on David's observation on updating minor releases, I came 
across this from the release notes for 9.3.3:

"

Avoid multiple name lookups during table and index DDL (Robert Haas, 
Andres Freund)

If the name lookups come to different conclusions due to concurrent 
activity, we might perform some parts of the DDL on a different table 
than other parts. At least in the case of CREATE INDEX, this can be used 
to cause the permissions checks to be performed against a different 
table than the index creation, allowing for a privilege escalation 
attack. (CVE-2014-0062)
"

The commit notes:

https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=5f173040e324f6c2eebb90d86cf1b0cdb5890f0a



> 
> Chuck Martin
> Avondale Software


-- 
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver@aklaver.com