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Disallow RESET ROLE and
RESET SESSION AUTHORIZATION
inside security-definer functions (Tom, Heikki)
This covers a case that was missed in the previous
patch that disallowed SET
ROLE and SET SESSION
AUTHORIZATION inside security-definer functions.
(See CVE-2007-6600)
Protect against indirect security threats caused by index functions changing session-local state (Gurjeet Singh, Tom)
This change prevents allegedly-immutable index functions from possibly subverting a superuser's session (CVE-2009-4136).
Reject SSL certificates containing an embedded null byte in the common name (CN) field (Magnus)
This prevents unintended matching of a certificate to a server or client name during SSL validation (CVE-2009-4034).
Add new configuration parameter ssl_renegotiation_limit to control how
often we do session key renegotiation for an SSL
connection (Magnus)
This can be set to zero to disable renegotiation completely, which may be required if a broken SSL library is used. In particular, some vendors are shipping stopgap patches for CVE-2009-3555 that cause renegotiation attempts to fail.
Make substring() for
bit types treat any negative
length as meaning “all the rest of the string”
(Tom)
The previous coding treated only -1 that way, and would produce an invalid result value for other negative values, possibly leading to a crash (CVE-2010-0442).
Enforce restrictions in plperl using an opmask applied to the
whole interpreter, instead of using Safe.pm (Tim Bunce, Andrew Dunstan)
Recent developments have convinced us that
Safe.pm is too insecure to
rely on for making plperl
trustable. This change removes use of Safe.pm altogether, in favor of using a
separate interpreter with an opcode mask that is always
applied. Pleasant side effects of the change include that
it is now possible to use Perl's strict pragma in a natural way in
plperl, and that Perl's
$a and $b variables work as expected in sort
routines, and that function compilation is significantly
faster. (CVE-2010-1169)
Prevent PL/Tcl from executing untrustworthy code from
pltcl_modules (Tom)
PL/Tcl's feature for autoloading Tcl code from a
database table could be exploited for trojan-horse
attacks, because there was no restriction on who could
create or insert into that table. This change disables
the feature unless pltcl_modules is owned by a
superuser. (However, the permissions on the table are not
checked, so installations that really need a
less-than-secure modules table can still grant suitable
privileges to trusted non-superusers.) Also, prevent
loading code into the unrestricted “normal” Tcl
interpreter unless we are really going to execute a
pltclu function.
(CVE-2010-1170)
Use a separate interpreter for each calling SQL userid in PL/Perl and PL/Tcl (Tom Lane)
This change prevents security problems that can be
caused by subverting Perl or Tcl code that will be
executed later in the same session under another SQL user
identity (for example, within a SECURITY DEFINER function). Most
scripting languages offer numerous ways that that might
be done, such as redefining standard functions or
operators called by the target function. Without this
change, any SQL user with Perl or Tcl language usage
rights can do essentially anything with the SQL
privileges of the target function's owner.
The cost of this change is that intentional communication among Perl and Tcl functions becomes more difficult. To provide an escape hatch, PL/PerlU and PL/TclU functions continue to use only one interpreter per session. This is not considered a security issue since all such functions execute at the trust level of a database superuser already.
It is likely that third-party procedural languages that claim to offer trusted execution have similar security issues. We advise contacting the authors of any PL you are depending on for security-critical purposes.
Our thanks to Tim Bunce for pointing out this issue (CVE-2010-3433).
Fix buffer overrun in contrib/intarray's input function for
the query_int type (Apple)
This bug is a security risk since the function's return address could be overwritten. Thanks to Apple Inc's security team for reporting this issue and supplying the fix. (CVE-2010-4015)
Require execute permission on the trigger function for
CREATE TRIGGER (Robert
Haas)
This missing check could allow another user to execute
a trigger function with forged input data, by installing
it on a table he owns. This is only of significance for
trigger functions marked SECURITY
DEFINER, since otherwise trigger functions run as
the table owner anyway. (CVE-2012-0866)
Remove arbitrary limitation on length of common name in SSL certificates (Heikki Linnakangas)
Both libpq and the server truncated the common name extracted from an SSL certificate at 32 bytes. Normally this would cause nothing worse than an unexpected verification failure, but there are some rather-implausible scenarios in which it might allow one certificate holder to impersonate another. The victim would have to have a common name exactly 32 bytes long, and the attacker would have to persuade a trusted CA to issue a certificate in which the common name has that string as a prefix. Impersonating a server would also require some additional exploit to redirect client connections. (CVE-2012-0867)
Convert newlines to spaces in names written in pg_dump comments (Robert Haas)
pg_dump was incautious about sanitizing object names that are emitted within SQL comments in its output script. A name containing a newline would at least render the script syntactically incorrect. Maliciously crafted object names could present a SQL injection risk when the script is reloaded. (CVE-2012-0868)
Fix incorrect password transformation in contrib/pgcrypto's DES crypt() function (Solar Designer)
If a password string contained the byte value
0x80, the remainder of the
password was ignored, causing the password to be much
weaker than it appeared. With this fix, the rest of the
string is properly included in the DES hash. Any stored
password values that are affected by this bug will thus
no longer match, so the stored values may need to be
updated. (CVE-2012-2143)
Ignore SECURITY DEFINER
and SET attributes for a
procedural language's call handler (Tom Lane)
Applying such attributes to a call handler could crash the server. (CVE-2012-2655)
Prevent access to external files/URLs via XML entity references (Noah Misch, Tom Lane)
xml_parse() would
attempt to fetch external files or URLs as needed to
resolve DTD and entity references in an XML value, thus
allowing unprivileged database users to attempt to fetch
data with the privileges of the database server. While
the external data wouldn't get returned directly to the
user, portions of it could be exposed in error messages
if the data didn't parse as valid XML; and in any case
the mere ability to check existence of a file might be
useful to an attacker. (CVE-2012-3489)
Prevent access to external files/URLs via contrib/xml2's xslt_process() (Peter Eisentraut)
libxslt offers the ability to read and write both files and URLs through stylesheet commands, thus allowing unprivileged database users to both read and write data with the privileges of the database server. Disable that through proper use of libxslt's security options. (CVE-2012-3488)
Also, remove xslt_process()'s ability to fetch
documents and stylesheets from external files/URLs. While
this was a documented “feature”, it was long regarded as a
bad idea. The fix for CVE-2012-3489 broke that
capability, and rather than expend effort on trying to
fix it, we're just going to summarily remove it.
Prevent execution of enum_recv from SQL (Tom Lane)
The function was misdeclared, allowing a simple SQL command to crash the server. In principle an attacker might be able to use it to examine the contents of server memory. Our thanks to Sumit Soni (via Secunia SVCRP) for reporting this issue. (CVE-2013-0255)
Fix insecure parsing of server command-line switches (Mitsumasa Kondo, Kyotaro Horiguchi)
A connection request containing a database name that
begins with “-”
could be crafted to damage or destroy files within the
server's data directory, even if the request is
eventually rejected. (CVE-2013-1899)
Reset OpenSSL randomness state in each postmaster child process (Marko Kreen)
This avoids a scenario wherein random numbers
generated by contrib/pgcrypto functions might be
relatively easy for another database user to guess. The
risk is only significant when the postmaster is
configured with ssl =
on but most connections
don't use SSL encryption. (CVE-2013-1900)
Make REPLICATION privilege checks test current user not authenticated user (Noah Misch)
An unprivileged database user could exploit this
mistake to call pg_start_backup() or pg_stop_backup(), thus possibly
interfering with creation of routine backups.
(CVE-2013-1901)
Shore up GRANT ... WITH ADMIN
OPTION restrictions (Noah Misch)
Granting a role without ADMIN
OPTION is supposed to prevent the grantee from
adding or removing members from the granted role, but
this restriction was easily bypassed by doing
SET ROLE first. The security
impact is mostly that a role member can revoke the access
of others, contrary to the wishes of his grantor.
Unapproved role member additions are a lesser concern,
since an uncooperative role member could provide most of
his rights to others anyway by creating views or
SECURITY DEFINER functions.
(CVE-2014-0060)
Prevent privilege escalation via manual calls to PL validator functions (Andres Freund)
The primary role of PL validator functions is to be
called implicitly during CREATE
FUNCTION, but they are also normal SQL functions
that a user can call explicitly. Calling a validator on a
function actually written in some other language was not
checked for and could be exploited for
privilege-escalation purposes. The fix involves adding a
call to a privilege-checking function in each validator
function. Non-core procedural languages will also need to
make this change to their own validator functions, if
any. (CVE-2014-0061)
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)
Prevent buffer overrun with long datetime strings (Noah Misch)
The MAXDATELEN constant
was too small for the longest possible value of type
interval, allowing a buffer
overrun in interval_out().
Although the datetime input functions were more careful
about avoiding buffer overrun, the limit was short enough
to cause them to reject some valid inputs, such as input
containing a very long timezone name. The ecpg library contained these
vulnerabilities along with some of its own.
(CVE-2014-0063)
Prevent buffer overrun due to integer overflow in size calculations (Noah Misch, Heikki Linnakangas)
Several functions, mostly type input functions, calculated an allocation size without checking for overflow. If overflow did occur, a too-small buffer would be allocated and then written past. (CVE-2014-0064)
Prevent overruns of fixed-size buffers (Peter Eisentraut, Jozef Mlich)
Use strlcpy() and
related functions to provide a clear guarantee that
fixed-size buffers are not overrun. Unlike the preceding
items, it is unclear whether these cases really represent
live issues, since in most cases there appear to be
previous constraints on the size of the input string.
Nonetheless it seems prudent to silence all Coverity
warnings of this type. (CVE-2014-0065)
Avoid crashing if crypt() returns NULL (Honza Horak,
Bruce Momjian)
There are relatively few scenarios in which
crypt() could return NULL,
but contrib/chkpass would
crash if it did. One practical case in which this could
be an issue is if libc
is configured to refuse to execute unapproved hashing
algorithms (e.g., “FIPS mode”). (CVE-2014-0066)
Document risks of make
check in the regression testing instructions (Noah
Misch, Tom Lane)
Since the temporary server started by make check uses “trust”
authentication, another user on the same machine could
connect to it as database superuser, and then potentially
exploit the privileges of the operating-system user who
started the tests. A future release will probably
incorporate changes in the testing procedure to prevent
this risk, but some public discussion is needed first. So
for the moment, just warn people against using
make check when there are
untrusted users on the same machine. (CVE-2014-0067)
Secure Unix-domain sockets of temporary postmasters
started during make check
(Noah Misch)
Any local user able to access the socket file could
connect as the server's bootstrap superuser, then proceed
to execute arbitrary code as the operating-system user
running the test, as we previously noted in
CVE-2014-0067. This change defends against that risk by
placing the server's socket in a temporary, mode 0700
subdirectory of /tmp. The
hazard remains however on platforms where Unix sockets
are not supported, notably Windows, because then the
temporary postmaster must accept local TCP
connections.
A useful side effect of this change is to simplify
make check testing in builds
that override DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR. Popular
non-default values like /var/run/postgresql are often not
writable by the build user, requiring workarounds that
will no longer be necessary.
Fix buffer overruns in to_char() (Bruce Momjian)
When to_char() processes a numeric formatting template calling for a large number of digits, PostgreSQL would read past the end of a buffer. When processing a crafted timestamp formatting template, PostgreSQL would write past the end of a buffer. Either case could crash the server. We have not ruled out the possibility of attacks that lead to privilege escalation, though they seem unlikely. (CVE-2015-0241)
Fix buffer overrun in replacement *printf() functions (Tom Lane)
PostgreSQL includes a replacement implementation of printf and related functions. This code will overrun a stack buffer when formatting a floating point number (conversion specifiers e, E, f, F, g or G) with requested precision greater than about 500. This will crash the server, and we have not ruled out the possibility of attacks that lead to privilege escalation. A database user can trigger such a buffer overrun through the to_char() SQL function. While that is the only affected core PostgreSQL functionality, extension modules that use printf-family functions may be at risk as well.
This issue primarily affects PostgreSQL on Windows. PostgreSQL uses the system implementation of these functions where adequate, which it is on other modern platforms. (CVE-2015-0242)
Fix buffer overruns in contrib/pgcrypto (Marko Tiikkaja, Noah Misch)
Errors in memory size tracking within the pgcrypto module permitted stack buffer overruns and improper dependence on the contents of uninitialized memory. The buffer overrun cases can crash the server, and we have not ruled out the possibility of attacks that lead to privilege escalation. (CVE-2015-0243)
Fix possible loss of frontend/backend protocol synchronization after an error (Heikki Linnakangas)
If any error occurred while the server was in the middle of reading a protocol message from the client, it could lose synchronization and incorrectly try to interpret part of the message's data as a new protocol message. An attacker able to submit crafted binary data within a command parameter might succeed in injecting his own SQL commands this way. Statement timeout and query cancellation are the most likely sources of errors triggering this scenario. Particularly vulnerable are applications that use a timeout and also submit arbitrary user-crafted data as binary query parameters. Disabling statement timeout will reduce, but not eliminate, the risk of exploit. Our thanks to Emil Lenngren for reporting this issue. (CVE-2015-0244)
Fix information leak via constraint-violation error messages (Stephen Frost)
Some server error messages show the values of columns that violate a constraint, such as a unique constraint. If the user does not have SELECT privilege on all columns of the table, this could mean exposing values that the user should not be able to see. Adjust the code so that values are displayed only when they came from the SQL command or could be selected by the user. (CVE-2014-8161)
Lock down regression testing's temporary installations on Windows (Noah Misch)
Use SSPI authentication to allow connections only from the OS user who launched the test suite. This closes on Windows the same vulnerability previously closed on other platforms, namely that other users might be able to connect to the test postmaster. (CVE-2014-0067)
Avoid possible crash when client disconnects just before the authentication timeout expires (Benkocs Norbert Attila)
If the timeout interrupt fired partway through the session shutdown sequence, SSL-related state would be freed twice, typically causing a crash and hence denial of service to other sessions. Experimentation shows that an unauthenticated remote attacker could trigger the bug somewhat consistently, hence treat as security issue. (CVE-2015-3165)
Improve detection of system-call failures (Noah Misch)
Our replacement implementation of snprintf() failed to check for errors reported by the underlying system library calls; the main case that might be missed is out-of-memory situations. In the worst case this might lead to information exposure, due to our code assuming that a buffer had been overwritten when it hadn't been. Also, there were a few places in which security-relevant calls of other system library functions did not check for failure.
It remains possible that some calls of the *printf() family of functions are vulnerable to information disclosure if an out-of-memory error occurs at just the wrong time. We judge the risk to not be large, but will continue analysis in this area. (CVE-2015-3166)
In contrib/pgcrypto, uniformly report decryption failures as "Wrong key or corrupt data" (Noah Misch)
Previously, some cases of decryption with an incorrect key could report other error message texts. It has been shown that such variance in error reports can aid attackers in recovering keys from other systems. While it's unknown whether pgcrypto's specific behaviors are likewise exploitable, it seems better to avoid the risk by using a one-size-fits-all message. (CVE-2015-3167)
Guard against stack overflows in json parsing (Oskari Saarenmaa)
If an application constructs PostgreSQL json or jsonb values from arbitrary user input, the application's users can reliably crash the PostgreSQL server, causing momentary denial of service. (CVE-2015-5289)
Fix contrib/pgcrypto to detect and report too-short crypt() salts (Josh Kupershmidt)
Certain invalid salt arguments crashed the server or disclosed a few bytes of server memory. We have not ruled out the viability of attacks that arrange for presence of confidential information in the disclosed bytes, but they seem unlikely. (CVE-2015-5288)
Fix infinite loops and buffer-overrun problems in regular expressions (Tom Lane)
Very large character ranges in bracket expressions could cause infinite loops in some cases, and memory overwrites in other cases. (CVE-2016-0773)
Prevent certain PL/Java parameters from being set by non-superusers (Noah Misch)
This change mitigates a PL/Java security bug (CVE-2016-0766), which was fixed in PL/Java by marking these parameters as superuser-only. To fix the security hazard for sites that update PostgreSQL more frequently than PL/Java, make the core code aware of them also.
Maintain row-security status properly in cached plans (Stephen Frost)
In a session that performs queries as more than one role, the plan cache might incorrectly re-use a plan that was generated for another role ID, thus possibly applying the wrong set of policies when row-level security (RLS) is in use. (CVE-2016-2193)
Add must-be-superuser checks to some new contrib/pageinspect functions (Andreas Seltenreich)
Most functions in the pageinspect extension that inspect bytea values disallow calls by non-superusers, but brin_page_type() and brin_metapage_info() failed to do so. Passing contrived bytea values to them might crash the server or disclose a few bytes of server memory. Add the missing permissions checks to prevent misuse. (CVE-2016-3065)
Fix possible mis-evaluation of nested CASE-WHEN expressions (Heikki Linnakangas, Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
A CASE expression appearing within the test value subexpression of another CASE could become confused about whether its own test value was null or not. Also, inlining of a SQL function implementing the equality operator used by a CASE expression could result in passing the wrong test value to functions called within a CASE expression in the SQL function's body. If the test values were of different data types, a crash might result; moreover such situations could be abused to allow disclosure of portions of server memory. (CVE-2016-5423)
Fix client programs' handling of special characters in database and role names (Noah Misch, Nathan Bossart, Michael Paquier)
Numerous places in vacuumdb and other client programs could become confused by database and role names containing double quotes or backslashes. Tighten up quoting rules to make that safe. Also, ensure that when a conninfo string is used as a database name parameter to these programs, it is correctly treated as such throughout.
Fix handling of paired double quotes in psql's \connect and \password commands to match the documentation.
Introduce a new -reuse-previous option in psql's \connect command to allow explicit control of whether to re-use connection parameters from a previous connection. (Without this, the choice is based on whether the database name looks like a conninfo string, as before.) This allows secure handling of database names containing special characters in pg_dumpall scripts.
pg_dumpall now refuses to deal with database and role names containing carriage returns or newlines, as it seems impractical to quote those characters safely on Windows. In future we may reject such names on the server side, but that step has not been taken yet.
These are considered security fixes because crafted object names containing special characters could have been used to execute commands with superuser privileges the next time a superuser executes pg_dumpall or other routine maintenance operations. (CVE-2016-5424)
Restrict visibility of pg_user_mappings.umoptions, to protect passwords stored as user mapping options (Michael Paquier, Feike Steenbergen)
The previous coding allowed the owner of a foreign server object, or anyone he has granted server USAGE permission to, to see the options for all user mappings associated with that server. This might well include passwords for other users. Adjust the view definition to match the behavior of information_schema.user_mapping_options, namely that these options are visible to the user being mapped, or if the mapping is for PUBLIC and the current user is the server owner, or if the current user is a superuser. (CVE-2017-7486)
By itself, this patch will only fix the behavior in newly initdb'd databases. If you wish to apply this change in an existing database, follow the corrected procedure shown in the changelog entry for CVE-2017-7547, in Section E.13.
Prevent exposure of statistical information via leaky operators (Peter Eisentraut)
Some selectivity estimation functions in the planner will apply user-defined operators to values obtained from pg_statistic, such as most common values and histogram entries. This occurs before table permissions are checked, so a nefarious user could exploit the behavior to obtain these values for table columns he does not have permission to read. To fix, fall back to a default estimate if the operator's implementation function is not certified leak-proof and the calling user does not have permission to read the table column whose statistics are needed. At least one of these criteria is satisfied in most cases in practice. (CVE-2017-7484)
Restore libpq's recognition of the PGREQUIRESSL environment variable (Daniel Gustafsson)
Processing of this environment variable was unintentionally dropped in PostgreSQL 9.3, but its documentation remained. This creates a security hazard, since users might be relying on the environment variable to force SSL-encrypted connections, but that would no longer be guaranteed. Restore handling of the variable, but give it lower priority than PGSSLMODE, to avoid breaking configurations that work correctly with post-9.3 code. (CVE-2017-7485)
Further restrict visibility of pg_user_mappings.umoptions, to protect passwords stored as user mapping options (Noah Misch)
The fix for CVE-2017-7486 was incorrect: it allowed a user to see the options in her own user mapping, even if she did not have USAGE permission on the associated foreign server. Such options might include a password that had been provided by the server owner rather than the user herself. Since information_schema.user_mapping_options does not show the options in such cases, pg_user_mappings should not either. (CVE-2017-7547)
By itself, this patch will only fix the behavior in newly initdb'd databases. If you wish to apply this change in an existing database, you will need to do the following:
Restart the postmaster after adding allow_system_table_mods = true to postgresql.conf. (In versions supporting ALTER SYSTEM, you can use that to make the configuration change, but you'll still need a restart.)
In each database of the cluster, run the following commands as superuser:
SET search_path = pg_catalog;
CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW pg_user_mappings AS
SELECT
U.oid AS umid,
S.oid AS srvid,
S.srvname AS srvname,
U.umuser AS umuser,
CASE WHEN U.umuser = 0 THEN
'public'
ELSE
A.rolname
END AS usename,
CASE WHEN (U.umuser <> 0 AND A.rolname = current_user
AND (pg_has_role(S.srvowner, 'USAGE')
OR has_server_privilege(S.oid, 'USAGE')))
OR (U.umuser = 0 AND pg_has_role(S.srvowner, 'USAGE'))
OR (SELECT rolsuper FROM pg_authid WHERE rolname = current_user)
THEN U.umoptions
ELSE NULL END AS umoptions
FROM pg_user_mapping U
LEFT JOIN pg_authid A ON (A.oid = U.umuser) JOIN
pg_foreign_server S ON (U.umserver = S.oid);Do not forget to include the template0 and template1 databases, or the vulnerability will still exist in databases you create later. To fix template0, you'll need to temporarily make it accept connections. In PostgreSQL 9.5 and later, you can use
ALTER DATABASE template0 WITH ALLOW_CONNECTIONS true;
and then after fixing template0, undo that with
ALTER DATABASE template0 WITH ALLOW_CONNECTIONS false;
In prior versions, instead use
UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = true WHERE datname = 'template0'; UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = false WHERE datname = 'template0';
Finally, remove the allow_system_table_mods configuration setting, and again restart the postmaster.
Disallow empty passwords in all password-based authentication methods (Heikki Linnakangas)
libpq ignores empty password specifications, and does not transmit them to the server. So, if a user's password has been set to the empty string, it's impossible to log in with that password via psql or other libpq-based clients. An administrator might therefore believe that setting the password to empty is equivalent to disabling password login. However, with a modified or non-libpq-based client, logging in could be possible, depending on which authentication method is configured. In particular the most common method, md5, accepted empty passwords. Change the server to reject empty passwords in all cases. (CVE-2017-7546)
Make lo_put() check for UPDATE privilege on the target large object (Tom Lane, Michael Paquier)
lo_put() should surely require the same permissions as lowrite(), but the check was missing, allowing any user to change the data in a large object. (CVE-2017-7548)
Ensure that INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE checks table permissions and RLS policies in all cases (Dean Rasheed)
The update path of INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE requires SELECT permission on the columns of the arbiter index, but it failed to check for that in the case of an arbiter specified by constraint name. In addition, for a table with row level security enabled, it failed to check updated rows against the table's SELECT policies (regardless of how the arbiter index was specified). (CVE-2017-15099)
Fix crash due to rowtype mismatch in json{b}_populate_recordset() (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
These functions used the result rowtype specified in the FROM ... AS clause without checking that it matched the actual rowtype of the supplied tuple value. If it didn't, that would usually result in a crash, though disclosure of server memory contents seems possible as well. (CVE-2017-15098)
Fix sample server-start scripts to become $PGUSER before opening $PGLOG (Noah Misch)
Previously, the postmaster log file was opened while still running as root. The database owner could therefore mount an attack against another system user by making $PGLOG be a symbolic link to some other file, which would then become corrupted by appending log messages.
By default, these scripts are not installed anywhere. Users who have made use of them will need to manually recopy them, or apply the same changes to their modified versions. If the existing $PGLOG file is root-owned, it will need to be removed or renamed out of the way before restarting the server with the corrected script. (CVE-2017-12172)
Ensure that all temporary files made by pg_upgrade are non-world-readable (Tom Lane, Noah Misch)
pg_upgrade normally restricts its temporary files to be readable and writable only by the calling user. But the temporary file containing pg_dumpall -g output would be group- or world-readable, or even writable, if the user's umask setting allows. In typical usage on multi-user machines, the umask and/or the working directory's permissions would be tight enough to prevent problems; but there may be people using pg_upgrade in scenarios where this oversight would permit disclosure of database passwords to unfriendly eyes. (CVE-2018-1053)
Document how to configure installations and applications to guard against search-path-dependent trojan-horse attacks from other users (Noah Misch)
Using a search_path setting that includes any schemas writable by a hostile user enables that user to capture control of queries and then run arbitrary SQL code with the permissions of the attacked user. While it is possible to write queries that are proof against such hijacking, it is notationally tedious, and it's very easy to overlook holes. Therefore, we now recommend configurations in which no untrusted schemas appear in one's search path. Relevant documentation appears in Section 5.8.6 (for database administrators and users), Section 32.1 (for application authors), Section 36.15.1 (for extension authors), and CREATE FUNCTION (for authors of SECURITY DEFINER functions). (CVE-2018-1058)
Avoid use of insecure search_path settings in pg_dump and other client programs (Noah Misch, Tom Lane)
pg_dump, pg_upgrade, vacuumdb and other PostgreSQL-provided applications were themselves vulnerable to the type of hijacking described in the previous changelog entry; since these applications are commonly run by superusers, they present particularly attractive targets. To make them secure whether or not the installation as a whole has been secured, modify them to include only the pg_catalog schema in their search_path settings. Autovacuum worker processes now do the same, as well.
In cases where user-provided functions are indirectly executed by these programs — for example, user-provided functions in index expressions — the tighter search_path may result in errors, which will need to be corrected by adjusting those user-provided functions to not assume anything about what search path they are invoked under. That has always been good practice, but now it will be necessary for correct behavior. (CVE-2018-1058)
| Config parameter: | Default value: |
|---|---|
| add_missing_from | off |
| checkpoint_segments | 3 |
| custom_variable_classes | |
| krb_srvname | postgres |
| regex_flavor | advanced |
| silent_mode | off |
| unix_socket_directory |
| Config parameter: | Default value in Pg 8.4: | Default value in Pg 9.6.8: |
|---|---|---|
| effective_cache_size | 16384 | 524288 |
| maintenance_work_mem | 16384 | 65536 |
| search_path | "$user",public | "$user", public |
| shared_buffers | 4096 | 16384 |
| standard_conforming_strings | off | on |
| unix_socket_permissions | 511 | 0777 |
| wal_buffers | 8 | 512 |
| wal_sync_method | open_datasync | fdatasync |
| work_mem | 1024 | 4096 |
⇑ Upgrade to 8.4.1 released on 2009-09-09 - docs
Fix WAL page header initialization at the end of archive recovery (Heikki)
This could lead to failure to process the WAL in a subsequent archive recovery.
Fix “cannot make new WAL entries during recovery” error (Tom)
Fix problem that could make expired rows visible after a crash (Tom)
This bug involved a page status bit potentially not being set correctly after a server crash.
Disallow RESET ROLE and
RESET SESSION AUTHORIZATION
inside security-definer functions (Tom, Heikki)
This covers a case that was missed in the previous
patch that disallowed SET
ROLE and SET SESSION
AUTHORIZATION inside security-definer functions.
(See CVE-2007-6600)
Make LOAD of an
already-loaded loadable module into a no-op (Tom)
Formerly, LOAD would
attempt to unload and re-load the module, but this is
unsafe and not all that useful.
Make window function PARTITION
BY and ORDER BY items
always be interpreted as simple expressions (Tom)
In 8.4.0 these lists were parsed following the rules
used for top-level GROUP BY
and ORDER BY lists. But this
was not correct per the SQL standard, and it led to
possible circularity.
Fix several errors in planning of semi-joins (Tom)
These led to wrong query results in some cases where
IN or EXISTS was used together with another
join.
Fix handling of whole-row references to subqueries that are within an outer join (Tom)
An example is SELECT COUNT(ss.*)
FROM ... LEFT JOIN (SELECT ...) ss ON .... Here,
ss.* would be treated as
ROW(NULL,NULL,...) for
null-extended join rows, which is not the same as a
simple NULL. Now it is treated as a simple NULL.
Fix Windows shared-memory allocation code (Tsutomu Yamada, Magnus)
This bug led to the often-reported “could not reattach to shared memory” error message.
Fix locale handling with plperl (Heikki)
This bug could cause the server's locale setting to change when a plperl function is called, leading to data corruption.
Fix handling of reloptions to ensure setting one option doesn't force default values for others (Itagaki Takahiro)
Ensure that a “fast shutdown” request will forcibly terminate open sessions, even if a “smart shutdown” was already in progress (Fujii Masao)
Avoid memory leak for array_agg() in GROUP BY queries (Tom)
Treat to_char(..., 'TH')
as an uppercase ordinal suffix with 'HH'/'HH12'
(Heikki)
It was previously handled as 'th' (lowercase).
Include the fractional part in the result of
EXTRACT(second) and
EXTRACT(milliseconds) for
time and time with time zone inputs (Tom)
This has always worked for floating-point datetime configurations, but was broken in the integer datetime code.
Fix overflow for INTERVAL
'
when x ms'x is more
than 2 million and integer datetimes are in use (Alex
Hunsaker)
Improve performance when processing toasted values in index scans (Tom)
This is particularly useful for PostGIS.
Fix a typo that disabled commit_delay (Jeff Janes)
Output early-startup messages to postmaster.log if the server is started
in silent mode (Tom)
Previously such error messages were discarded, leading to difficulty in debugging.
Remove translated FAQs (Peter)
They are now on the wiki. The main FAQ was moved to the wiki some time ago.
Fix pg_ctl to not go
into an infinite loop if postgresql.conf is empty (Jeff
Davis)
Fix several errors in pg_dump's --binary-upgrade mode (Bruce, Tom)
pg_dump --binary-upgrade
is used by pg_migrator.
Fix contrib/xml2's
xslt_process() to properly
handle the maximum number of parameters (twenty)
(Tom)
Improve robustness of libpq's code to recover from errors
during COPY FROM STDIN
(Tom)
Avoid including conflicting readline and editline header files when both libraries are installed (Zdenek Kotala)
Work around gcc bug that causes “floating-point exception” instead of “division by zero” on some platforms (Tom)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2009l for DST law changes in Bangladesh, Egypt, Mauritius.
⇑ Upgrade to 8.4.2 released on 2009-12-14 - docs
Protect against indirect security threats caused by index functions changing session-local state (Gurjeet Singh, Tom)
This change prevents allegedly-immutable index functions from possibly subverting a superuser's session (CVE-2009-4136).
Reject SSL certificates containing an embedded null byte in the common name (CN) field (Magnus)
This prevents unintended matching of a certificate to a server or client name during SSL validation (CVE-2009-4034).
Fix hash index corruption (Tom)
The 8.4 change that made hash indexes keep entries
sorted by hash value failed to update the bucket
splitting and compaction routines to preserve the
ordering. So application of either of those operations
could lead to permanent corruption of an index, in the
sense that searches might fail to find entries that are
present. To deal with this, it is recommended to
REINDEX any hash indexes you
may have after installing this update.
Fix possible crash during backend-startup-time cache initialization (Tom)
Avoid crash on empty thesaurus dictionary (Tom)
Prevent signals from interrupting VACUUM at unsafe times (Alvaro)
This fix prevents a PANIC if a VACUUM FULL is canceled after it's
already committed its tuple movements, as well as
transient errors if a plain VACUUM is interrupted after having
truncated the table.
Fix possible crash due to integer overflow in hash table size calculation (Tom)
This could occur with extremely large planner estimates for the size of a hashjoin's result.
Fix crash if a DROP is
attempted on an internally-dependent object (Tom)
Fix very rare crash in inet/cidr
comparisons (Chris Mikkelson)
Ensure that shared tuple-level locks held by prepared transactions are not ignored (Heikki)
Fix premature drop of temporary files used for a cursor that is accessed within a subtransaction (Heikki)
Fix memory leak in syslogger process when rotating to a new CSV logfile (Tom)
Fix memory leak in postmaster when re-parsing
pg_hba.conf (Tom)
Fix Windows permission-downgrade logic (Jesse Morris)
This fixes some cases where the database failed to start on Windows, often with misleading error messages such as “could not locate matching postgres executable”.
Make FOR UPDATE/SHARE in
the primary query not propagate into WITH queries (Tom)
For example, in
WITH w AS (SELECT * FROM foo) SELECT * FROM w, bar ... FOR UPDATE
the FOR UPDATE will now
affect bar but not
foo. This is more useful and
consistent than the original 8.4 behavior, which tried to
propagate FOR UPDATE into
the WITH query but always
failed due to assorted implementation restrictions. It
also follows the design rule that WITH queries are executed as if
independent of the main query.
Fix bug with a WITH
RECURSIVE query immediately inside another one
(Tom)
Fix concurrency bug in hash indexes (Tom)
Concurrent insertions could cause index scans to transiently report wrong results.
Fix incorrect logic for GiST index page splits, when the split depends on a non-first column of the index (Paul Ramsey)
Fix wrong search results for a multi-column GIN index
with fastupdate enabled
(Teodor)
Fix bugs in WAL entry creation for GIN indexes (Tom)
These bugs were masked when full_page_writes was on, but with it off
a WAL replay failure was certain if a crash occurred
before the next checkpoint.
Don't error out if recycling or removing an old WAL file fails at the end of checkpoint (Heikki)
It's better to treat the problem as non-fatal and allow the checkpoint to complete. Future checkpoints will retry the removal. Such problems are not expected in normal operation, but have been seen to be caused by misdesigned Windows anti-virus and backup software.
Ensure WAL files aren't repeatedly archived on Windows (Heikki)
This is another symptom that could happen if some other process interfered with deletion of a no-longer-needed file.
Fix PAM password processing to be more robust (Tom)
The previous code is known to fail with the
combination of the Linux pam_krb5 PAM module with Microsoft
Active Directory as the domain controller. It might have
problems elsewhere too, since it was making unjustified
assumptions about what arguments the PAM stack would pass
to it.
Raise the maximum authentication token (Kerberos ticket) size in GSSAPI and SSPI authentication methods (Ian Turner)
While the old 2000-byte limit was more than enough for Unix Kerberos implementations, tickets issued by Windows Domain Controllers can be much larger.
Ensure that domain constraints are enforced in
constructs like ARRAY[...]::domain, where the domain is
over an array type (Heikki)
Fix foreign-key logic for some cases involving composite-type columns as foreign keys (Tom)
Ensure that a cursor's snapshot is not modified after it is created (Alvaro)
This could lead to a cursor delivering wrong results if later operations in the same transaction modify the data the cursor is supposed to return.
Fix CREATE TABLE to
properly merge default expressions coming from different
inheritance parent tables (Tom)
This used to work but was broken in 8.4.
Re-enable collection of access statistics for sequences (Akira Kurosawa)
This used to work but was broken in 8.3.
Fix processing of ownership dependencies during
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION
(Tom)
Fix incorrect handling of WHERE x=x conditions (Tom)
In some cases these could get ignored as redundant,
but they aren't — they're equivalent to x IS NOT NULL.
Fix incorrect plan construction when using hash
aggregation to implement DISTINCT for textually identical
volatile expressions (Tom)
Fix Assert failure for a volatile SELECT DISTINCT ON expression (Tom)
Fix ts_stat() to not
fail on an empty tsvector value
(Tom)
Make text search parser accept underscores in XML attributes (Peter)
Fix encoding handling in xml
binary input (Heikki)
If the XML header doesn't specify an encoding, we now assume UTF-8 by default; the previous handling was inconsistent.
Fix bug with calling plperl from plperlu or vice versa (Tom)
An error exit from the inner function could result in crashes due to failure to re-select the correct Perl interpreter for the outer function.
Fix session-lifespan memory leak when a PL/Perl function is redefined (Tom)
Ensure that Perl arrays are properly converted to PostgreSQL arrays when returned by a set-returning PL/Perl function (Andrew Dunstan, Abhijit Menon-Sen)
This worked correctly already for non-set-returning functions.
Fix rare crash in exception processing in PL/Python (Peter)
Fix ecpg problem with
comments in DECLARE CURSOR
statements (Michael)
Fix ecpg to not treat recently-added keywords as reserved words (Tom)
This affected the keywords CALLED, CATALOG, DEFINER, ENUM, FOLLOWING, INVOKER, OPTIONS, PARTITION, PRECEDING, RANGE, SECURITY, SERVER, UNBOUNDED, and WRAPPER.
Re-allow regular expression special characters in
psql's \df function name parameter (Tom)
In contrib/fuzzystrmatch, correct the
calculation of levenshtein
distances with non-default costs (Marcin Mank)
In contrib/pg_standby,
disable triggering failover with a signal on Windows
(Fujii Masao)
This never did anything useful, because Windows doesn't have Unix-style signals, but recent changes made it actually crash.
Put FREEZE and
VERBOSE options in the right
order in the VACUUM command
that contrib/vacuumdb
produces (Heikki)
Fix possible leak of connections when contrib/dblink encounters an error
(Tatsuhito Kasahara)
Ensure psql's flex module is compiled with the correct system header definitions (Tom)
This fixes build failures on platforms where
--enable-largefile causes
incompatible changes in the generated code.
Make the postmaster ignore any application_name parameter in connection
request packets, to improve compatibility with future
libpq versions (Tom)
Update the timezone abbreviation files to match current reality (Joachim Wieland)
This includes adding IDT
to the default timezone abbreviation set.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2009s for DST law changes in Antarctica, Argentina, Bangladesh, Fiji, Novokuznetsk, Pakistan, Palestine, Samoa, Syria; also historical corrections for Hong Kong.
⇑ Upgrade to 8.4.3 released on 2010-03-15 - docs
Add new configuration parameter ssl_renegotiation_limit to control how
often we do session key renegotiation for an SSL
connection (Magnus)
This can be set to zero to disable renegotiation completely, which may be required if a broken SSL library is used. In particular, some vendors are shipping stopgap patches for CVE-2009-3555 that cause renegotiation attempts to fail.
Fix possible deadlock during backend startup (Tom)
Fix possible crashes due to not handling errors during relcache reload cleanly (Tom)
Fix possible crash due to use of dangling pointer to a cached plan (Tatsuo)
Fix possible crash due to overenthusiastic
invalidation of cached plan for ROLLBACK (Tom)
Fix possible crashes when trying to recover from a failure in subtransaction start (Tom)
Fix server memory leak associated with use of savepoints and a client encoding different from server's encoding (Tom)
Fix incorrect WAL data emitted during end-of-recovery cleanup of a GIST index page split (Yoichi Hirai)
This would result in index corruption, or even more likely an error during WAL replay, if we were unlucky enough to crash during end-of-recovery cleanup after having completed an incomplete GIST insertion.
Fix bug in WAL redo cleanup method for GIN indexes (Heikki)
Fix incorrect comparison of scan key in GIN index search (Teodor)
Make substring() for
bit types treat any negative
length as meaning “all the rest of the string”
(Tom)
The previous coding treated only -1 that way, and would produce an invalid result value for other negative values, possibly leading to a crash (CVE-2010-0442).
Fix integer-to-bit-string conversions to handle the first fractional byte correctly when the output bit width is wider than the given integer by something other than a multiple of 8 bits (Tom)
Fix some cases of pathologically slow regular expression matching (Tom)
Fix bug occurring when trying to inline a SQL function that returns a set of a composite type that contains dropped columns (Tom)
Fix bug with trying to update a field of an element of a composite-type array column (Tom)
Avoid failure when EXPLAIN has to print a FieldStore or
assignment ArrayRef expression (Tom)
These cases can arise now that EXPLAIN VERBOSE tries to print plan node
target lists.
Avoid an unnecessary coercion failure in some cases
where an undecorated literal string appears in a subquery
within UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT (Tom)
This fixes a regression for some cases that worked before 8.4.
Avoid undesirable rowtype compatibility check failures in some cases where a whole-row Var has a rowtype that contains dropped columns (Tom)
Fix the STOP WAL LOCATION
entry in backup history files to report the next WAL
segment's name when the end location is exactly at a
segment boundary (Itagaki Takahiro)
Always pass the catalog ID to an option validator
function specified in CREATE
FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER (Martin Pihlak)
Fix some more cases of temporary-file leakage (Heikki)
This corrects a problem introduced in the previous minor release. One case that failed is when a plpgsql function returning set is called within another function's exception handler.
Add support for doing FULL JOIN
ON FALSE (Tom)
This prevents a regression from pre-8.4 releases for some queries that can now be simplified to a constant-false join condition.
Improve constraint exclusion processing of boolean-variable cases, in particular make it possible to exclude a partition that has a “bool_column = false” constraint (Tom)
Prevent treating an INOUT
cast as representing binary compatibility (Heikki)
Include column name in the message when warning about inability to grant or revoke column-level privileges (Stephen Frost)
This is more useful than before and helps to prevent
confusion when a REVOKE
generates multiple messages, which formerly appeared to
be duplicates.
When reading pg_hba.conf
and related files, do not treat @something as a file inclusion request
if the @ appears inside
quote marks; also, never treat @ by itself as a file inclusion request
(Tom)
This prevents erratic behavior if a role or database
name starts with @. If you
need to include a file whose path name contains spaces,
you can still do so, but you must write @"/path to/file" rather than putting the
quotes around the whole construct.
Prevent infinite loop on some platforms if a directory
is named as an inclusion target in pg_hba.conf and related files (Tom)
Fix possible infinite loop if SSL_read or SSL_write fails without setting
errno (Tom)
This is reportedly possible with some Windows versions of openssl.
Disallow GSSAPI authentication on local connections, since it requires a hostname to function correctly (Magnus)
Protect ecpg against applications freeing strings unexpectedly (Michael)
Make ecpg report the proper SQLSTATE if the connection disappears (Michael)
Fix translation of cell contents in psql \d
output (Heikki)
Fix psql's
numericlocale option to not
format strings it shouldn't in latex and troff output
formats (Heikki)
Fix a small per-query memory leak in psql (Tom)
Make psql return the
correct exit status (3) when ON_ERROR_STOP and --single-transaction are both specified
and an error occurs during the implied COMMIT (Bruce)
Fix pg_dump's output of permissions for foreign servers (Heikki)
Fix possible crash in parallel pg_restore due to out-of-range dependency IDs (Tom)
Fix plpgsql failure in one case where a composite column is set to NULL (Tom)
Fix possible failure when calling PL/Perl functions from PL/PerlU or vice versa (Tim Bunce)
Add volatile markings in
PL/Python to avoid possible compiler-specific misbehavior
(Zdenek Kotala)
Ensure PL/Tcl initializes the Tcl interpreter fully (Tom)
The only known symptom of this oversight is that the
Tcl clock command misbehaves
if using Tcl 8.5 or later.
Prevent ExecutorEnd from
being run on portals created within a failed transaction
or subtransaction (Tom)
This is known to cause issues when using contrib/auto_explain.
Prevent crash in contrib/dblink when too many key
columns are specified to a dblink_build_sql_* function (Rushabh
Lathia, Joe Conway)
Allow zero-dimensional arrays in contrib/ltree operations (Tom)
This case was formerly rejected as an error, but it's
more convenient to treat it the same as a zero-element
array. In particular this avoids unnecessary failures
when an ltree operation is
applied to the result of ARRAY(SELECT ...) and the sub-select
returns no rows.
Fix assorted crashes in contrib/xml2 caused by sloppy memory
management (Tom)
Make building of contrib/xml2 more robust on Windows
(Andrew)
Fix race condition in Windows signal handling (Radu Ilie)
One known symptom of this bug is that rows in
pg_listener could be
dropped under heavy load.
Make the configure script report failure if the C compiler does not provide a working 64-bit integer datatype (Tom)
This case has been broken for some time, and no longer seems worth supporting, so just reject it at configure time instead.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2010e for DST law changes in Bangladesh, Chile, Fiji, Mexico, Paraguay, Samoa.
⇑ Upgrade to 8.4.4 released on 2010-05-17 - docs
Enforce restrictions in plperl using an opmask applied to the
whole interpreter, instead of using Safe.pm (Tim Bunce, Andrew Dunstan)
Recent developments have convinced us that
Safe.pm is too insecure to
rely on for making plperl
trustable. This change removes use of Safe.pm altogether, in favor of using a
separate interpreter with an opcode mask that is always
applied. Pleasant side effects of the change include that
it is now possible to use Perl's strict pragma in a natural way in
plperl, and that Perl's
$a and $b variables work as expected in sort
routines, and that function compilation is significantly
faster. (CVE-2010-1169)
Prevent PL/Tcl from executing untrustworthy code from
pltcl_modules (Tom)
PL/Tcl's feature for autoloading Tcl code from a
database table could be exploited for trojan-horse
attacks, because there was no restriction on who could
create or insert into that table. This change disables
the feature unless pltcl_modules is owned by a
superuser. (However, the permissions on the table are not
checked, so installations that really need a
less-than-secure modules table can still grant suitable
privileges to trusted non-superusers.) Also, prevent
loading code into the unrestricted “normal” Tcl
interpreter unless we are really going to execute a
pltclu function.
(CVE-2010-1170)
Fix data corruption during WAL replay of ALTER ... SET TABLESPACE (Tom)
When archive_mode is on,
ALTER ... SET TABLESPACE
generates a WAL record whose replay logic was incorrect.
It could write the data to the wrong place, leading to
possibly-unrecoverable data corruption. Data corruption
would be observed on standby slaves, and could occur on
the master as well if a database crash and recovery
occurred after committing the ALTER and before the next
checkpoint.
Fix possible crash if a cache reset message is received during rebuild of a relcache entry (Heikki)
This error was introduced in 8.4.3 while fixing a related failure.
Apply per-function GUC settings while running the language validator for the function (Itagaki Takahiro)
This avoids failures if the function's code is invalid
without the setting; an example is that SQL functions may
not parse if the search_path
is not correct.
Do constraint exclusion for inherited UPDATE and DELETE target tables when constraint_exclusion = partition (Tom)
Due to an oversight, this setting previously only
caused constraint exclusion to be checked in SELECT commands.
Do not allow an unprivileged user to reset superuser-only parameter settings (Alvaro)
Previously, if an unprivileged user ran ALTER USER ... RESET ALL for himself, or
ALTER DATABASE ... RESET ALL
for a database he owns, this would remove all special
parameter settings for the user or database, even ones
that are only supposed to be changeable by a superuser.
Now, the ALTER will only
remove the parameters that the user has permission to
change.
Avoid possible crash during backend shutdown if
shutdown occurs when a CONTEXT addition would be made to log
entries (Tom)
In some cases the context-printing function would fail because the current transaction had already been rolled back when it came time to print a log message.
Fix erroneous handling of %r parameter in recovery_end_command (Heikki)
The value always came out zero.
Ensure the archiver process responds to changes in
archive_command as soon as
possible (Tom)
Fix PL/pgSQL's CASE
statement to not fail when the case expression is a query
that returns no rows (Tom)
Update PL/Perl's ppport.h for modern Perl versions
(Andrew)
Fix assorted memory leaks in PL/Python (Andreas Freund, Tom)
Handle empty-string connect parameters properly in ecpg (Michael)
Prevent infinite recursion in psql when expanding a variable that refers to itself (Tom)
Fix psql's
\copy to not add spaces
around a dot within \copy (select
...) (Tom)
Addition of spaces around the decimal point in a numeric literal would result in a syntax error.
Avoid formatting failure in psql when running in a locale
context that doesn't match the client_encoding (Tom)
Fix unnecessary “GIN indexes do not support whole-index
scans” errors for unsatisfiable queries
using contrib/intarray
operators (Tom)
Ensure that contrib/pgstattuple functions respond
to cancel interrupts promptly (Tatsuhito Kasahara)
Make server startup deal properly with the case that
shmget() returns
EINVAL for an existing
shared memory segment (Tom)
This behavior has been observed on BSD-derived kernels including macOS. It resulted in an entirely-misleading startup failure complaining that the shared memory request size was too large.
Avoid possible crashes in syslogger process on Windows (Heikki)
Deal more robustly with incomplete time zone information in the Windows registry (Magnus)
Update the set of known Windows time zone names (Magnus)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2010j for DST law changes in Argentina, Australian Antarctic, Bangladesh, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Russia, Syria, Tunisia; also historical corrections for Taiwan.
Also, add PKST (Pakistan
Summer Time) to the default set of timezone
abbreviations.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.0 released on 2010-09-20 - docs
Allow a standby server to accept read-only queries (Simon Riggs, Heikki Linnakangas)
This feature is called Hot Standby. There are new
postgresql.conf and
recovery.conf settings
to control this feature, as well as extensive
documentation.
Allow write-ahead log (WAL) data to be streamed to a standby server (Fujii Masao, Heikki Linnakangas)
This feature is called Streaming Replication.
Previously WAL
data could be sent to standby servers only in units
of entire WAL
files (normally 16 megabytes each). Streaming
Replication eliminates this inefficiency and allows
updates on the master to be propagated to standby
servers with very little delay. There are new
postgresql.conf and
recovery.conf settings
to control this feature, as well as extensive
documentation.
Add
pg_last_xlog_receive_location()
and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(),
which can be used to monitor standby server
WAL activity
(Simon Riggs, Fujii Masao, Heikki Linnakangas)
Allow per-tablespace values to be set for
sequential and random page cost estimates
(seq_page_cost/random_page_cost) via ALTER
TABLESPACE ... SET/RESET (Robert Haas)
Improve performance and reliability of EvalPlanQual rechecks in join queries (Tom Lane)
UPDATE, DELETE, and SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE queries that
involve joins will now behave much better when
encountering freshly-updated rows.
Improve performance of TRUNCATE when the table was
created or truncated earlier in the same transaction
(Tom Lane)
Improve performance of finding inheritance child tables (Tom Lane)
Remove unnecessary outer joins (Robert Haas)
Outer joins where the inner side is unique and not referenced above the join are unnecessary and are therefore now removed. This will accelerate many automatically generated queries, such as those created by object-relational mappers (ORMs).
Allow IS NOT NULL
restrictions to use indexes (Tom Lane)
This is particularly useful for finding
MAX()/MIN() values in indexes that
contain many null values.
Improve the optimizer's choices about when to use
materialize nodes, and when to use sorting versus
hashing for DISTINCT
(Tom Lane)
Improve the optimizer's equivalence detection for
expressions involving boolean <> operators (Tom Lane)
Use the same random seed every time GEQO plans a query (Andres Freund)
While the Genetic Query Optimizer (GEQO) still
selects random plans, it now always selects the same
random plans for identical queries, thus giving more
consistent performance. You can modify
geqo_seed to experiment with alternative
plans.
Improve GEQO plan selection (Tom Lane)
This avoids the rare error “failed to make a valid plan”, and should also improve planning speed.
Improve ANALYZE to support
inheritance-tree statistics (Tom Lane)
This is particularly useful for partitioned tables. However, autovacuum does not yet automatically re-analyze parent tables when child tables change.
Improve autovacuum's detection of when re-analyze is necessary (Tom Lane)
Improve optimizer's estimation for greater/less-than comparisons (Tom Lane)
When looking up statistics for greater/less-than comparisons, if the comparison value is in the first or last histogram bucket, use an index (if available) to fetch the current actual column minimum or maximum. This greatly improves the accuracy of estimates for comparison values near the ends of the data range, particularly if the range is constantly changing due to addition of new data.
Allow setting of number-of-distinct-values
statistics using ALTER
TABLE (Robert Haas)
This allows users to override the estimated number
or percentage of distinct values for a column. This
statistic is normally computed by ANALYZE, but the estimate can be
poor, especially on tables with very large numbers of
rows.
Add support for RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service) authentication (Magnus Hagander)
Allow LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) authentication to operate in “search/bind” mode (Robert Fleming, Magnus Hagander)
This allows the user to be looked up first, then the system uses the DN (Distinguished Name) returned for that user.
Add samehost and samenet designations to pg_hba.conf (Stef Walter)
These match the server's IP address and subnet address respectively.
Pass trusted SSL root certificate names to the client so the client can return an appropriate client certificate (Craig Ringer)
Add the ability for clients to set an application
name, which is displayed in pg_stat_activity (Dave Page)
This allows administrators to characterize database traffic and troubleshoot problems by source application.
Add a SQLSTATE option (%e) to
log_line_prefix (Guillaume Smet)
This allows users to compile statistics on errors and messages by error code number.
Write to the Windows event log in UTF16 encoding (Itagaki Takahiro)
Now there is true multilingual support for PostgreSQL log messages on Windows.
Add
pg_stat_reset_shared('bgwriter')
to reset the cluster-wide shared statistics for the
background writer (Greg Smith)
Add
pg_stat_reset_single_table_counters()
and pg_stat_reset_single_function_counters()
to allow resetting the statistics counters for
individual tables and functions (Magnus Hagander)
Allow setting of configuration parameters based on database/role combinations (Alvaro Herrera)
Previously only per-database and per-role settings
were possible, not combinations. All role and
database settings are now stored in the new
pg_db_role_setting
system catalog. A new psql command \drds shows these settings. The
legacy system views pg_roles, pg_shadow, and pg_user do not show combination
settings, and therefore no longer completely
represent the configuration for a user or
database.
Add server parameter
bonjour, which controls whether a
Bonjour-enabled server advertises itself via
Bonjour (Tom
Lane)
The default is off, meaning it does not advertise. This allows packagers to distribute Bonjour-enabled builds without worrying that individual users might not want the feature.
Add server parameter
enable_material, which controls the use of
materialize nodes in the optimizer (Robert Haas)
The default is on. When off, the optimizer will not add materialize nodes purely for performance reasons, though they will still be used when necessary for correctness.
Change server parameter
log_temp_files to use default file size
units of kilobytes (Robert Haas)
Previously this setting was interpreted in bytes if no units were specified.
Log changes of parameter values when postgresql.conf is reloaded (Peter
Eisentraut)
This lets administrators and security staff audit
changes of database settings, and is also very
convenient for checking the effects of postgresql.conf edits.
Properly enforce superuser permissions for custom server parameters (Tom Lane)
Non-superusers can no longer issue ALTER ROLE/DATABASE SET for parameters that are
not currently known to the server. This allows the
server to correctly check that superuser-only
parameters are only set by superusers. Previously,
the SET would be allowed
and then ignored at session start, making
superuser-only custom parameters much less useful
than they should be.
Perform SELECT FOR
UPDATE/SHARE
processing after applying LIMIT, so the number of rows returned
is always predictable (Tom Lane)
Previously, changes made by concurrent transactions
could cause a SELECT FOR
UPDATE to unexpectedly return fewer rows than
specified by its LIMIT.
FOR UPDATE in combination
with ORDER BY can still
produce surprising results, but that can be corrected
by placing FOR UPDATE in a
subquery.
Allow mixing of traditional and SQL-standard
LIMIT/OFFSET syntax (Tom Lane)
Extend the supported frame options in window functions (Hitoshi Harada)
Frames can now start with CURRENT ROW, and the ROWS /n
PRECEDINGFOLLOWING
options are now supported.
Make SELECT INTO and
CREATE TABLE AS return row
counts to the client in their command tags (Boszormenyi
Zoltan)
This can save an entire round-trip to the client,
allowing result counts and pagination to be calculated
without an additional COUNT query.
Support Unicode surrogate pairs (dual 16-bit
representation) in
U& strings and
identifiers (Peter Eisentraut)
Support Unicode escapes in
E'...' strings
(Marko Kreen)
Speed up CREATE
DATABASE by deferring flushes to disk
(Andres Freund, Greg Stark)
Allow comments on columns of tables, views, and composite types only, not other relation types such as indexes and TOAST tables (Tom Lane)
Allow the creation of enumerated types containing no values (Bruce Momjian)
Let values of columns having storage type
MAIN remain on the main
heap page unless the row cannot fit on a page (Kevin
Grittner)
Previously MAIN values
were forced out to TOAST tables until the row size was
less than one-quarter of the page size.
Implement IF EXISTS
for ALTER TABLE DROP
COLUMN and ALTER TABLE
DROP CONSTRAINT (Andres Freund)
Allow ALTER TABLE
commands that rewrite tables to skip WAL logging (Itagaki
Takahiro)
Such operations either produce a new copy of the table or are rolled back, so WAL archiving can be skipped, unless running in continuous archiving mode. This reduces I/O overhead and improves performance.
Fix failure of ALTER TABLE
when done by non-owner of table (Tom
Lane)table ADD
COLUMN col
serial
Add support for copying COMMENTS and STORAGE settings in CREATE TABLE ... LIKE commands
(Itagaki Takahiro)
Add a shortcut for copying all properties in
CREATE TABLE ... LIKE
commands (Itagaki Takahiro)
Add the SQL-standard CREATE
TABLE ... OF command
(Peter Eisentraut)type
This allows creation of a table that matches an existing composite type. Additional constraints and defaults can be specified in the command.
Add deferrable unique constraints (Dean Rasheed)
This allows mass updates, such as UPDATE tab SET col = col + 1, to
work reliably on columns that have unique indexes or
are marked as primary keys. If the constraint is
specified as DEFERRABLE
it will be checked at the end of the statement,
rather than after each row is updated. The constraint
check can also be deferred until the end of the
current transaction, allowing such updates to be
spread over multiple SQL commands.
Add exclusion constraints (Jeff Davis)
Exclusion constraints generalize uniqueness
constraints by allowing arbitrary comparison
operators, not just equality. They are created with
the
CREATE TABLE CONSTRAINT ... EXCLUDE
clause. The most common use of exclusion constraints
is to specify that column entries must not overlap,
rather than simply not be equal. This is useful for
time periods and other ranges, as well as arrays.
This feature enhances checking of data integrity for
many calendaring, time-management, and scientific
applications.
Improve uniqueness-constraint violation error messages to report the values causing the failure (Itagaki Takahiro)
For example, a uniqueness constraint violation
might now report Key (x)=(2)
already exists.
Add the ability to make mass permission changes
across a whole schema using the new GRANT/REVOKE
IN SCHEMA clause (Petr Jelinek)
This simplifies management of object permissions and makes it easier to utilize database roles for application data security.
Add ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES command
to control privileges of objects created later (Petr
Jelinek)
This greatly simplifies the assignment of object privileges in a complex database application. Default privileges can be set for tables, views, sequences, and functions. Defaults may be assigned on a per-schema basis, or database-wide.
Add the ability to control large object (BLOB)
permissions with GRANT/REVOKE (KaiGai Kohei)
Formerly, any database user could read or modify any large object. Read and write permissions can now be granted and revoked per large object, and the ownership of large objects is tracked.
Make LISTEN/NOTIFY store pending events in a
memory queue, rather than in a system table (Joachim
Wieland)
This substantially improves performance, while retaining the existing features of transactional support and guaranteed delivery.
Allow NOTIFY to
pass an optional “payload” string to listeners
(Joachim Wieland)
This greatly improves the usefulness of LISTEN/NOTIFY as a general-purpose event
queue system.
Allow CLUSTER on
all per-database system catalogs (Tom Lane)
Shared catalogs still cannot be clustered.
Accept COPY ... CSV FORCE
QUOTE * (Itagaki Takahiro)
Now * can be used as
shorthand for “all columns” in the
FORCE QUOTE clause.
Add new COPY syntax
that allows options to be specified inside
parentheses (Robert Haas, Emmanuel Cecchet)
This allows greater flexibility for future
COPY options. The old
syntax is still supported, but only for pre-existing
options.
Allow EXPLAIN to
output in XML,
JSON, or
YAML format
(Robert Haas, Greg Sabino Mullane)
The new output formats are easily
machine-readable, supporting the development of new
tools for analysis of EXPLAIN output.
Add new BUFFERS
option to report query buffer usage during
EXPLAIN ANALYZE (Itagaki
Takahiro)
This allows better query profiling for individual queries. Buffer usage is no longer reported in the output for log_statement_stats and related settings.
Add hash usage information to EXPLAIN output (Robert Haas)
Add new EXPLAIN
syntax that allows options to be specified inside
parentheses (Robert Haas)
This allows greater flexibility for future
EXPLAIN options. The old
syntax is still supported, but only for pre-existing
options.
Change VACUUM FULL to
rewrite the entire table and rebuild its indexes,
rather than moving individual rows around to compact
space (Itagaki Takahiro, Tom Lane)
The previous method was usually slower and caused
index bloat. Note that the new method will use more
disk space transiently during VACUUM FULL; potentially as much as
twice the space normally occupied by the table and
its indexes.
Add new VACUUM syntax
that allows options to be specified inside
parentheses (Itagaki Takahiro)
This allows greater flexibility for future
VACUUM options. The old
syntax is still supported, but only for pre-existing
options.
Allow an index to be named automatically by
omitting the index name in CREATE
INDEX (Tom Lane)
By default, multicolumn indexes are now named after all their columns; and index expression columns are now named based on their expressions (Tom Lane)
Reindexing shared system catalogs is now fully transactional and crash-safe (Tom Lane)
Formerly, reindexing a shared index was only allowed in standalone mode, and a crash during the operation could leave the index in worse condition than it was before.
Add point_ops
operator class for GiST (Teodor Sigaev)
This feature permits GiST indexing of point columns. The index can be used
for several types of queries such as point <@ polygon (point is in
polygon). This should make many PostGIS queries faster.
Use red-black binary trees for GIN index creation (Teodor Sigaev)
Red-black trees are self-balancing. This avoids slowdowns in cases where the input is in nonrandom order.
Allow bytea values to be written in hex
notation (Peter Eisentraut)
The server parameter
bytea_output controls whether hex or
traditional format is used for bytea output. Libpq's PQescapeByteaConn() function
automatically uses the hex format when connected to
PostgreSQL 9.0 or
newer servers. However, pre-9.0 libpq versions will not
correctly process hex format from newer servers.
The new hex format will be directly compatible with more applications that use binary data, allowing them to store and retrieve it without extra conversion. It is also significantly faster to read and write than the traditional format.
Allow server parameter extra_float_digits
to be increased to 3 (Tom
Lane)
The previous maximum extra_float_digits setting was
2. There are cases where 3
digits are needed to dump and restore float4 values exactly. pg_dump will now use the setting
of 3 when dumping from a server that allows it.
Tighten input checking for int2vector values (Caleb Welton)
Add prefix support in synonym dictionaries (Teodor
Sigaev)
Add filtering dictionaries (Teodor Sigaev)
Filtering dictionaries allow tokens to be modified then passed to subsequent dictionaries.
Allow underscores in email-address tokens (Teodor Sigaev)
Use more standards-compliant rules for parsing URL tokens (Tom Lane)
Allow function calls to supply parameter names and match them to named parameters in the function definition (Pavel Stehule)
For example, if a function is defined to take
parameters a and
b, it can be called with
func(a := 7, b := 12) or
func(b := 12, a := 7).
Support locale-specific regular expression processing with UTF-8 server encoding (Tom Lane)
Locale-specific regular expression functionality includes case-insensitive matching and locale-specific character classes. Previously, these features worked correctly for non-ASCII characters only if the database used a single-byte server encoding (such as LATIN1). They will still misbehave in multi-byte encodings other than UTF-8.
Add support for scientific notation in to_char() (EEEE
specification) (Pavel Stehule, Brendan Jurd)
Make to_char() honor
FM (fill mode) in
Y, YY, and YYY specifications (Bruce Momjian, Tom
Lane)
It was already honored by YYYY.
Fix to_char() to
output localized numeric and monetary strings in the
correct encoding on Windows (Hiroshi Inoue, Itagaki
Takahiro, Bruce Momjian)
Correct calculations of “overlaps” and “contains” operations for polygons (Teodor Sigaev)
The polygon &&
(overlaps) operator formerly just checked to see if the
two polygons' bounding boxes overlapped. It now does a
more correct check. The polygon @> and <@ (contains/contained by)
operators formerly checked to see if one polygon's
vertexes were all contained in the other; this can
wrongly report “true” for some non-convex
polygons. Now they check that all line segments of one
polygon are contained in the other.
Allow aggregate functions to use ORDER BY (Andrew Gierth)
For example, this is now supported: array_agg(a ORDER BY b). This is
useful with aggregates for which the order of input
values is significant, and eliminates the need to use
a nonstandard subquery to determine the ordering.
Multi-argument aggregate functions can now use
DISTINCT (Andrew
Gierth)
Add the
string_agg()
aggregate function to combine values into a single
string (Pavel Stehule)
Aggregate functions that are called with
DISTINCT are now passed
NULL values if the aggregate transition function is
not marked as STRICT
(Andrew Gierth)
For example, agg(DISTINCT
x) might pass a NULL x value to agg(). This is more consistent with
the behavior in non-DISTINCT cases.
Add
get_bit() and
set_bit() functions for
bit strings, mirroring
those for bytea (Leonardo
F)
Implement
OVERLAY() (replace)
for bit strings and
bytea (Leonardo F)
Add
pg_table_size() and
pg_indexes_size() to
provide a more user-friendly interface to the
pg_relation_size()
function (Bernd Helmle)
Add
has_sequence_privilege() for
sequence permission checking (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
Update the information_schema views to conform to SQL:2008 (Peter Eisentraut)
Make the information_schema views correctly
display maximum octet lengths for char and varchar columns (Peter Eisentraut)
Speed up information_schema privilege views
(Joachim Wieland)
Support execution of anonymous code blocks using
the DO statement
(Petr Jelinek, Joshua Tolley, Hannu Valtonen)
This allows execution of server-side code without the need to create and delete a temporary function definition. Code can be executed in any language for which the user has permissions to define a function.
Implement SQL-standard-compliant per-column triggers (Itagaki Takahiro)
Such triggers are fired only when the specified
column(s) are affected by the query, e.g. appear in
an UPDATE's SET list.
Add the WHEN clause
to CREATE
TRIGGER to allow control over whether a
trigger is fired (Itagaki Takahiro)
While the same type of check can always be
performed inside the trigger, doing it in an external
WHEN clause can have
performance benefits.
Add the OR REPLACE
clause to CREATE
LANGUAGE (Tom Lane)
This is helpful to optionally install a language if it does not already exist, and is particularly helpful now that PL/pgSQL is installed by default.
Install PL/pgSQL by default (Bruce Momjian)
The language can still be removed from a particular database if the administrator has security or performance concerns about making it available.
Improve handling of cases where PL/pgSQL variable names conflict with identifiers used in queries within a function (Tom Lane)
The default behavior is now to throw an error when
there is a conflict, so as to avoid surprising
behaviors. This can be modified, via the
configuration parameter
plpgsql.variable_conflict or the
per-function option #variable_conflict, to allow either
the variable or the query-supplied column to be used.
In any case PL/pgSQL will no longer attempt to
substitute variables in places where they would not
be syntactically valid.
Make PL/pgSQL use the main lexer, rather than its own version (Tom Lane)
This ensures accurate tracking of the main system's behavior for details such as string escaping. Some user-visible details, such as the set of keywords considered reserved in PL/pgSQL, have changed in consequence.
Avoid throwing an unnecessary error for an invalid record reference (Tom Lane)
An error is now thrown only if the reference is actually fetched, rather than whenever the enclosing expression is reached. For example, many people have tried to do this in triggers:
if TG_OP = 'INSERT' and NEW.col1 = ... then
This will now actually work as expected.
Improve PL/pgSQL's ability to handle row types with dropped columns (Pavel Stehule)
Allow input parameters to be assigned values within PL/pgSQL functions (Steve Prentice)
Formerly, input parameters were treated as being
declared CONST, so the
function's code could not change their values. This
restriction has been removed to simplify porting of
functions from other DBMSes that do not impose the
equivalent restriction. An input parameter now acts
like a local variable initialized to the passed-in
value.
Improve error location reporting in PL/pgSQL (Tom Lane)
Add count and
ALL options to
MOVE
FORWARD/BACKWARD
in PL/pgSQL (Pavel Stehule)
Allow PL/pgSQL's WHERE
CURRENT OF to use a cursor variable (Tom
Lane)
Allow PL/pgSQL's OPEN
to use parameters (Pavel Stehule,
Itagaki Takahiro)cursor FOR
EXECUTE
This is accomplished with a new USING clause.
Add new PL/Perl functions:
quote_literal(), quote_nullable(), quote_ident(), encode_bytea(), decode_bytea(), looks_like_number(), encode_array_literal(),
encode_array_constructor()
(Tim Bunce)
Add server parameter
plperl.on_init to specify a PL/Perl
initialization function (Tim Bunce)
plperl.on_plperl_init and
plperl.on_plperlu_init are also
available for initialization that is specific to the
trusted or untrusted language respectively.
Support END blocks in
PL/Perl (Tim Bunce)
END blocks do not
currently allow database access.
Allow use strict in
PL/Perl (Tim Bunce)
Perl strict checks
can also be globally enabled with the new server
parameter
plperl.use_strict.
Allow require in
PL/Perl (Tim Bunce)
This basically tests to see if the module is loaded, and if not, generates an error. It will not allow loading of modules that the administrator has not preloaded via the initialization parameters.
Allow use feature in
PL/Perl if Perl version 5.10 or later is used (Tim
Bunce)
Verify that PL/Perl return values are valid in the server encoding (Andrew Dunstan)
Add Unicode support in PL/Python (Peter Eisentraut)
Strings are automatically converted from/to the server encoding as necessary.
Improve bytea support in
PL/Python (Caleb Welton)
Bytea values passed into
PL/Python are now represented as binary, rather than
the PostgreSQL bytea text
format. Bytea values
containing null bytes are now also output properly
from PL/Python. Passing of boolean, integer, and
float values was also improved.
Support arrays as parameters and return values in PL/Python (Peter Eisentraut)
Improve mapping of SQL domains to Python types (Peter Eisentraut)
Add Python 3 support to PL/Python (Peter Eisentraut)
The new server-side language is called plpython3u. This cannot be used
in the same session with the Python 2 server-side
language.
Improve error location and exception reporting in PL/Python (Peter Eisentraut)
Add an --analyze-only
option to vacuumdb, to analyze without
vacuuming (Bruce Momjian)
Add support for quoting/escaping the values of psql variables as SQL strings or identifiers (Pavel Stehule, Robert Haas)
For example, :'var'
will produce the value of var quoted and properly escaped as a
literal string, while :"var" will produce its value quoted
and escaped as an identifier.
Ignore a leading UTF-8-encoded Unicode byte-order marker in script files read by psql (Itagaki Takahiro)
This is enabled when the client encoding is UTF-8. It improves compatibility with certain editors, mostly on Windows, that insist on inserting such markers.
Fix psql --file - to
properly honor --single-transaction (Bruce
Momjian)
Avoid overwriting of psql's command-line history when two psql sessions are run concurrently (Tom Lane)
Improve psql's tab completion support (Itagaki Takahiro)
Show \timing output
when it is enabled, regardless of “quiet”
mode (Peter Eisentraut)
Improve display of wrapped columns in psql (Roger Leigh)
This behavior is now the default. The previous
formatting is available by using \pset linestyle old-ascii.
Allow psql to
use fancy Unicode line-drawing characters via
\pset linestyle
unicode (Roger Leigh)
Make \d show child
tables that inherit from the specified parent
(Damien Clochard)
\d shows only the
number of child tables, while \d+ shows the names of all child
tables.
Show definitions of index columns in
\d index_name (Khee
Chin)
The definition is useful for expression indexes.
Show a view's defining query only in
\d+, not in
\d (Peter
Eisentraut)
Always including the query was deemed overly verbose.
Make pg_dump/pg_restore --clean
also remove large objects (Itagaki Takahiro)
Fix pg_dump to
properly dump large objects when standard_conforming_strings is
enabled (Tom Lane)
The previous coding could fail when dumping to an archive file and then generating script output from pg_restore.
pg_restore now emits large-object data in hex format when generating script output (Tom Lane)
This could cause compatibility problems if the script is then loaded into a pre-9.0 server. To work around that, restore directly to the server, instead.
Allow pg_dump to dump comments attached to columns of composite types (Taro Minowa (Higepon))
Make pg_dump
--verbose
output the pg_dump
and server versions in text output mode (Jim Cox, Tom
Lane)
These were already provided in custom output mode.
pg_restore now complains if any command-line arguments remain after the switches and optional file name (Tom Lane)
Previously, it silently ignored any such arguments.
Allow pg_ctl to be used safely to start the postmaster during a system reboot (Tom Lane)
Previously, pg_ctl's parent process could have been mistakenly identified as a running postmaster based on a stale postmaster lock file, resulting in a transient failure to start the database.
Give pg_ctl the ability to initialize the database (by invoking initdb) (Zdenek Kotala)
Add new libpq
functions
PQconnectdbParams() and PQconnectStartParams() (Guillaume
Lelarge)
These functions are similar to PQconnectdb() and PQconnectStart() except that they
accept a null-terminated array of connection options,
rather than requiring all options to be provided in a
single string.
Add libpq
functions
PQescapeLiteral()
and PQescapeIdentifier() (Robert
Haas)
These functions return appropriately quoted and
escaped SQL string literals and identifiers. The
caller is not required to pre-allocate the string
result, as is required by PQescapeStringConn().
Add support for a per-user service file (.pg_service.conf),
which is checked before the site-wide service file
(Peter Eisentraut)
Properly report an error if the specified libpq service cannot be found (Peter Eisentraut)
Add TCP keepalive settings in libpq (Tollef Fog Heen, Fujii Masao, Robert Haas)
Keepalive settings were already supported on the server end of TCP connections.
Avoid extra system calls to block and unblock
SIGPIPE in libpq, on platforms that offer
alternative methods (Jeremy Kerr)
When a .pgpass-supplied password
fails, mention where the password came from in the
error message (Bruce Momjian)
Load all SSL certificates given in the client certificate file (Tom Lane)
This improves support for indirectly-signed SSL certificates.
Add SQLDA (SQL Descriptor Area) support to ecpg (Boszormenyi Zoltan)
Add the DESCRIBE [ OUTPUT ] statement to
ecpg (Boszormenyi
Zoltan)
Add an ECPGtransactionStatus function to return the current transaction status (Bernd Helmle)
Add the string data
type in ecpg
Informix-compatibility mode (Boszormenyi Zoltan)
Allow ecpg to use
new and old variable names without
restriction (Michael Meskes)
Allow ecpg to use
variable names in free() (Michael Meskes)
Make ecpg_dynamic_type() return zero for
non-SQL3 data types (Michael Meskes)
Previously it returned the negative of the data type OID. This could be confused with valid type OIDs, however.
Support long long types
on platforms that already have 64-bit long (Michael Meskes)
Add out-of-scope cursor support in ecpg's native mode (Boszormenyi Zoltan)
This allows DECLARE
to use variables that are not in scope when
OPEN is called. This
facility already existed in ecpg's Informix-compatibility
mode.
Allow dynamic cursor names in ecpg (Boszormenyi Zoltan)
Allow ecpg to
use noise words FROM
and IN in FETCH and MOVE (Boszormenyi Zoltan)
Enable client thread safety by default (Bruce Momjian)
The thread-safety option can be disabled with
configure --disable-thread-safety.
Add support for controlling the Linux out-of-memory killer (Alex Hunsaker, Tom Lane)
Now that /proc/self/oom_adj allows disabling
of the Linux
out-of-memory (OOM)
killer, it's recommendable to disable OOM kills for the
postmaster. It may then be desirable to re-enable OOM
kills for the postmaster's child processes. The new
compile-time option LINUX_OOM_ADJ allows the killer to
be reactivated for child processes.
New Makefile targets
world,
install-world, and
installcheck-world
(Andrew Dunstan)
These are similar to the existing all, install, and installcheck targets, but they also
build the HTML
documentation, build and test contrib, and test server-side
languages and ecpg.
Add data and documentation installation location control to PGXS Makefiles (Mark Cave-Ayland)
Add Makefile rules to build the PostgreSQL documentation as a single HTML file or as a single plain-text file (Peter Eisentraut, Bruce Momjian)
Support compiling on 64-bit Windows and running in 64-bit mode (Tsutomu Yamada, Magnus Hagander)
This allows for large shared memory sizes on Windows.
Support server builds using Visual Studio 2008 (Magnus Hagander)
Distribute prebuilt documentation in a subdirectory tree, rather than as tar archive files inside the distribution tarball (Peter Eisentraut)
For example, the prebuilt HTML documentation is now in
doc/src/sgml/html/; the
manual pages are packaged similarly.
Make the server's lexer reentrant (Tom Lane)
This was needed for use of the lexer by PL/pgSQL.
Improve speed of memory allocation (Tom Lane, Greg Stark)
User-defined constraint triggers now have entries in
pg_constraint as well
as pg_trigger (Tom
Lane)
Because of this change, pg_constraint.pgconstrname is now redundant and
has been removed.
Add system catalog columns pg_constraint.conindid and pg_trigger.tgconstrindid to better document
the use of indexes for constraint enforcement (Tom
Lane)
Allow multiple conditions to be communicated to backends using a single operating system signal (Fujii Masao)
This allows new features to be added without a platform-specific constraint on the number of signal conditions.
Improve source code test coverage, including
contrib, PL/Python, and
PL/Perl (Peter Eisentraut, Andrew Dunstan)
Remove the use of flat files for system table bootstrapping (Tom Lane, Alvaro Herrera)
This improves performance when using many roles or databases, and eliminates some possible failure conditions.
Automatically generate the initial contents of
pg_attribute for
“bootstrapped” catalogs (John
Naylor)
This greatly simplifies changes to these catalogs.
Split the processing of INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations out of execMain.c (Marko Tiikkaja)
Updates are now executed in a separate ModifyTable node. This change is necessary infrastructure for future improvements.
Simplify translation of psql's SQL help text (Peter Eisentraut)
Reduce the lengths of some file names so that all file paths in the distribution tarball are less than 100 characters (Tom Lane)
Some decompression programs have problems with longer file paths.
Add a new
ERRCODE_INVALID_PASSWORD SQLSTATE error code (Bruce
Momjian)
With authors' permissions, remove the few remaining personal source code copyright notices (Bruce Momjian)
The personal copyright notices were insignificant but the community occasionally had to answer questions about them.
Add new documentation section about running PostgreSQL in non-durable mode to improve performance (Bruce Momjian)
Restructure the HTML documentation Makefile rules to make their
dependency checks work correctly, avoiding unnecessary
rebuilds (Peter Eisentraut)
Use DocBook XSL stylesheets for man page building, rather than Docbook2X (Peter Eisentraut)
This changes the set of tools needed to build the man pages.
Improve PL/Perl code structure (Tim Bunce)
Improve error context reports in PL/Perl (Alexey Klyukin)
Require Autoconf 2.63 to build configure (Peter Eisentraut)
Require Flex 2.5.31 or later to build from a CVS checkout (Tom Lane)
Require Perl version 5.8 or later to build from a CVS checkout (John Naylor, Andrew Dunstan)
Use a more modern API for Bonjour (Tom Lane)
Bonjour support now requires macOS 10.3 or later. The older API has been deprecated by Apple.
Add spinlock support for the SuperH architecture (Nobuhiro Iwamatsu)
Allow non-GCC compilers to use inline functions if they support them (Kurt Harriman)
Remove support for platforms that don't have a working 64-bit integer data type (Tom Lane)
Restructure use of LDFLAGS to be more consistent across
platforms (Tom Lane)
LDFLAGS is now used
for linking both executables and shared libraries,
and we add on LDFLAGS_EX
when linking executables, or LDFLAGS_SL when linking shared
libraries.
Make backend header files safe to include in C++ (Kurt Harriman, Peter Eisentraut)
These changes remove keyword conflicts that
previously made C++
usage difficult in backend code. However, there are
still other complexities when using C++ for backend functions.
extern "C" { } is still
necessary in appropriate places, and memory
management and error handling are still
problematic.
Add AggCheckCallContext() for use
in detecting if a C
function is being called as an aggregate (Hitoshi
Harada)
Change calling convention for SearchSysCache() and related
functions to avoid hard-wiring the maximum number of
cache keys (Robert Haas)
Existing calls will still work for the moment, but can be expected to break in 9.1 or later if not converted to the new style.
Require calls of fastgetattr() and heap_getattr() backend macros to
provide a non-NULL fourth argument (Robert Haas)
Custom typanalyze functions should no longer rely
on VacAttrStats.attr to determine the type of
data they will be passed (Tom Lane)
This was changed to allow collection of statistics on index columns for which the storage type is different from the underlying column data type. There are new fields that tell the actual datatype being analyzed.
Add parser hooks for processing ColumnRef and ParamRef nodes (Tom Lane)
Add a ProcessUtility hook so loadable modules can control utility commands (Itagaki Takahiro)
Add contrib/pg_upgrade to support
in-place upgrades (Bruce Momjian)
This avoids the requirement of dumping/reloading the database when upgrading to a new major release of PostgreSQL, thus reducing downtime by orders of magnitude. It supports upgrades to 9.0 from PostgreSQL 8.3 and 8.4.
Add support for preserving relation relfilenode values during
binary upgrades (Bruce Momjian)
Add support for preserving pg_type and pg_enum OIDs during binary
upgrades (Bruce Momjian)
Move data files within tablespaces into PostgreSQL-version-specific subdirectories (Bruce Momjian)
This simplifies binary upgrades.
Add multithreading option (-j) to contrib/pgbench (Itagaki
Takahiro)
This allows multiple CPUs to be used by pgbench, reducing the risk of pgbench itself becoming the test bottleneck.
Add \shell and
\setshell meta commands to
contrib/pgbench (Michael
Paquier)
New features for contrib/dict_xsyn (Sergey
Karpov)
The new options are matchorig, matchsynonyms, and keepsynonyms.
Add full text dictionary contrib/unaccent
(Teodor Sigaev)
This filtering dictionary removes accents from letters, which makes full-text searches over multiple languages much easier.
Add dblink_get_notify() to
contrib/dblink (Marcus
Kempe)
This allows asynchronous notifications in dblink.
Improve contrib/dblink's handling of dropped
columns (Tom Lane)
This affects dblink_build_sql_insert() and
related functions. These functions now number columns
according to logical not physical column numbers.
Greatly increase contrib/hstore's data length
limit, and add B-tree and hash support so GROUP BY and DISTINCT operations are possible on
hstore columns (Andrew
Gierth)
New functions and operators were also added. These
improvements make hstore a
full-function key-value store embedded in PostgreSQL.
Add contrib/passwordcheck to support
site-specific password strength policies (Laurenz
Albe)
The source code of this module should be modified to implement site-specific password policies.
Add contrib/pg_archivecleanup tool
(Simon Riggs)
This is designed to be used in the archive_cleanup_command server
parameter, to remove no-longer-needed archive
files.
Add query text to contrib/auto_explain output
(Andrew Dunstan)
Add buffer access counters to contrib/pg_stat_statements
(Itagaki Takahiro)
Update contrib/start-scripts/linux to
use /proc/self/oom_adj to
disable the Linux out-of-memory
(OOM) killer (Alex
Hunsaker, Tom Lane)
⇑ Upgrade to 9.0.1 released on 2010-10-04 - docs
Use a separate interpreter for each calling SQL userid in PL/Perl and PL/Tcl (Tom Lane)
This change prevents security problems that can be
caused by subverting Perl or Tcl code that will be
executed later in the same session under another SQL user
identity (for example, within a SECURITY DEFINER function). Most
scripting languages offer numerous ways that that might
be done, such as redefining standard functions or
operators called by the target function. Without this
change, any SQL user with Perl or Tcl language usage
rights can do essentially anything with the SQL
privileges of the target function's owner.
The cost of this change is that intentional communication among Perl and Tcl functions becomes more difficult. To provide an escape hatch, PL/PerlU and PL/TclU functions continue to use only one interpreter per session. This is not considered a security issue since all such functions execute at the trust level of a database superuser already.
It is likely that third-party procedural languages that claim to offer trusted execution have similar security issues. We advise contacting the authors of any PL you are depending on for security-critical purposes.
Our thanks to Tim Bunce for pointing out this issue (CVE-2010-3433).
Improve pg_get_expr()
security fix so that the function can still be used on
the output of a sub-select (Tom Lane)
Fix incorrect placement of placeholder evaluation (Tom Lane)
This bug could result in query outputs being non-null when they should be null, in cases where the inner side of an outer join is a sub-select with non-strict expressions in its output list.
Fix join removal's handling of placeholder expressions (Tom Lane)
Fix possible duplicate scans of UNION ALL member relations (Tom
Lane)
Prevent infinite loop in ProcessIncomingNotify() after unlistening (Jeff Davis)
Prevent show_session_authorization() from crashing within autovacuum processes (Tom Lane)
Re-allow input of Julian dates prior to 0001-01-01 AD (Tom Lane)
Input such as 'J100000'::date worked before 8.4, but
was unintentionally broken by added error-checking.
Make psql recognize DISCARD
ALL as a command that should not be encased in a
transaction block in autocommit-off mode (Itagaki
Takahiro)
Update build infrastructure and documentation to reflect the source code repository's move from CVS to Git (Magnus Hagander and others)
⇑ Upgrade to 9.0.2 released on 2010-12-16 - docs
Force the default
wal_sync_method to be fdatasync on Linux (Tom Lane, Marti
Raudsepp)
The default on Linux has actually been fdatasync for many years, but recent
kernel changes caused PostgreSQL to choose open_datasync instead. This choice did
not result in any performance improvement, and caused
outright failures on certain filesystems, notably
ext4 with the data=journal mount option.
Fix “too many KnownAssignedXids” error during Hot Standby replay (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix race condition in lock acquisition during Hot Standby (Simon Riggs)
Avoid unnecessary conflicts during Hot Standby (Simon Riggs)
This fixes some cases where replay was considered to conflict with standby queries (causing delay of replay or possibly cancellation of the queries), but there was no real conflict.
Fix assorted bugs in WAL replay logic for GIN indexes (Tom Lane)
This could result in “bad buffer id: 0” failures or corruption of index contents during replication.
Fix recovery from base backup when the starting checkpoint WAL record is not in the same WAL segment as its redo point (Jeff Davis)
Fix corner-case bug when streaming replication is enabled immediately after creating the master database cluster (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix persistent slowdown of autovacuum workers when multiple workers remain active for a long time (Tom Lane)
The effective vacuum_cost_limit for an autovacuum
worker could drop to nearly zero if it processed enough
tables, causing it to run extremely slowly.
Fix long-term memory leak in autovacuum launcher (Alvaro Herrera)
Avoid failure when trying to report an impending transaction wraparound condition from outside a transaction (Tom Lane)
This oversight prevented recovery after transaction wraparound got too close, because database startup processing would fail.
Add support for detecting register-stack overrun on
IA64 (Tom Lane)
The IA64 architecture has
two hardware stacks. Full prevention of stack-overrun
failures requires checking both.
Add a check for stack overflow in copyObject() (Tom Lane)
Certain code paths could crash due to stack overflow given a sufficiently complex query.
Fix detection of page splits in temporary GiST indexes (Heikki Linnakangas)
It is possible to have a “concurrent” page split in a temporary index, if for example there is an open cursor scanning the index when an insertion is done. GiST failed to detect this case and hence could deliver wrong results when execution of the cursor continued.
Fix error checking during early connection processing (Tom Lane)
The check for too many child processes was skipped in some cases, possibly leading to postmaster crash when attempting to add the new child process to fixed-size arrays.
Improve efficiency of window functions (Tom Lane)
Certain cases where a large number of tuples needed to
be read in advance, but work_mem was large enough to allow them
all to be held in memory, were unexpectedly slow.
percent_rank(),
cume_dist() and
ntile() in particular were
subject to this problem.
Avoid memory leakage while ANALYZE'ing complex index expressions
(Tom Lane)
Ensure an index that uses a whole-row Var still depends on its table (Tom Lane)
An index declared like create
index i on t (foo(t.*)) would not automatically
get dropped when its table was dropped.
Add missing support in DROP
OWNED BY for removing foreign data wrapper/server
privileges belonging to a user (Heikki Linnakangas)
Do not “inline” a SQL function with
multiple OUT parameters (Tom
Lane)
This avoids a possible crash due to loss of information about the expected result rowtype.
Fix crash when inline-ing a set-returning function whose argument list contains a reference to an inline-able user function (Tom Lane)
Behave correctly if ORDER
BY, LIMIT,
FOR UPDATE, or WITH is attached to the VALUES part of INSERT ... VALUES (Tom Lane)
Make the OFF keyword
unreserved (Heikki Linnakangas)
This prevents problems with using off as a variable name in PL/pgSQL. That worked before 9.0,
but was now broken because PL/pgSQL now treats all core
reserved words as reserved.
Fix constant-folding of COALESCE() expressions (Tom Lane)
The planner would sometimes attempt to evaluate sub-expressions that in fact could never be reached, possibly leading to unexpected errors.
Fix “could not find pathkey item to sort” planner failure with comparison of whole-row Vars (Tom Lane)
Fix postmaster crash when connection acceptance
(accept() or one of the
calls made immediately after it) fails, and the
postmaster was compiled with GSSAPI support (Alexander
Chernikov)
Retry after receiving an invalid response packet from a RADIUS authentication server (Magnus Hagander)
This fixes a low-risk potential denial of service condition.
Fix missed unlink of temporary files when log_temp_files is active (Tom Lane)
If an error occurred while attempting to emit the log message, the unlink was not done, resulting in accumulation of temp files.
Add print functionality for InhRelation nodes (Tom Lane)
This avoids a failure when debug_print_parse is enabled and certain
types of query are executed.
Fix incorrect calculation of distance from a point to a horizontal line segment (Tom Lane)
This bug affected several different geometric distance-measurement operators.
Fix incorrect calculation of transaction status in ecpg (Itagaki Takahiro)
Fix errors in psql's Unicode-escape support (Tom Lane)
Speed up parallel pg_restore when the archive contains many large objects (blobs) (Tom Lane)
Fix PL/pgSQL's handling of “simple” expressions to not fail in recursion or error-recovery cases (Tom Lane)
Fix PL/pgSQL's error reporting for no-such-column cases (Tom Lane)
As of 9.0, it would sometimes report “missing FROM-clause entry for table foo” when “record foo has no field bar” would be more appropriate.
Fix PL/Python to honor typmod (i.e., length or precision restrictions) when assigning to tuple fields (Tom Lane)
This fixes a regression from 8.4.
Fix PL/Python's handling of set-returning functions (Jan Urbanski)
Attempts to call SPI functions within the iterator generating a set result would fail.
Fix bug in contrib/cube's GiST picksplit algorithm
(Alexander Korotkov)
This could result in considerable inefficiency, though
not actually incorrect answers, in a GiST index on a
cube column. If you have such
an index, consider REINDEXing it after installing this
update.
Don't emit “identifier will be truncated”
notices in contrib/dblink
except when creating new connections (Itagaki
Takahiro)
Fix potential coredump on missing public key in
contrib/pgcrypto (Marti
Raudsepp)
Fix buffer overrun in contrib/pg_upgrade (Hernan
Gonzalez)
Fix memory leak in contrib/xml2's XPath query functions
(Tom Lane)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2010o for DST law changes in Fiji and Samoa; also historical corrections for Hong Kong.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.0.3 released on 2011-01-31 - docs
Before exiting walreceiver, ensure all the received WAL is fsync'd to disk (Heikki Linnakangas)
Otherwise the standby server could replay some un-synced WAL, conceivably leading to data corruption if the system crashes just at that point.
Avoid excess fsync activity in walreceiver (Heikki Linnakangas)
Make ALTER TABLE
revalidate uniqueness and exclusion constraints when
needed (Noah Misch)
This was broken in 9.0 by a change that was intended
to suppress revalidation during VACUUM FULL and CLUSTER, but unintentionally affected
ALTER TABLE as well.
Fix EvalPlanQual for UPDATE of an inheritance tree in which
the tables are not all alike (Tom Lane)
Any variation in the table row types (including dropped columns present in only some child tables) would confuse the EvalPlanQual code, leading to misbehavior or even crashes. Since EvalPlanQual is only executed during concurrent updates to the same row, the problem was only seen intermittently.
Avoid failures when EXPLAIN tries to display a simple-form
CASE expression (Tom
Lane)
If the CASE's test
expression was a constant, the planner could simplify the
CASE into a form that
confused the expression-display code, resulting in
“unexpected CASE
WHEN clause” errors.
Fix assignment to an array slice that is before the existing range of subscripts (Tom Lane)
If there was a gap between the newly added subscripts and the first pre-existing subscript, the code miscalculated how many entries needed to be copied from the old array's null bitmap, potentially leading to data corruption or crash.
Avoid unexpected conversion overflow in planner for very distant date values (Tom Lane)
The date type supports a
wider range of dates than can be represented by the
timestamp types, but the
planner assumed it could always convert a date to
timestamp with impunity.
Fix PL/Python crash when an array contains null entries (Alex Hunsaker)
Remove ecpg's fixed length limit for constants defining an array dimension (Michael Meskes)
Fix erroneous parsing of tsquery values containing ... & !(subexpression) | ... (Tom
Lane)
Queries containing this combination of operators were
not executed correctly. The same error existed in
contrib/intarray's
query_int type and contrib/ltree's ltxtquery type.
Fix buffer overrun in contrib/intarray's input function for
the query_int type (Apple)
This bug is a security risk since the function's return address could be overwritten. Thanks to Apple Inc's security team for reporting this issue and supplying the fix. (CVE-2010-4015)
Fix bug in contrib/seg's
GiST picksplit algorithm (Alexander Korotkov)
This could result in considerable inefficiency, though
not actually incorrect answers, in a GiST index on a
seg column. If you have such an
index, consider REINDEXing
it after installing this update. (This is identical to
the bug that was fixed in contrib/cube in the previous
update.)
⇑ Upgrade to 9.0.4 released on 2011-04-18 - docs
Fix pg_upgrade's handling of TOAST tables (Bruce Momjian)
The pg_class.relfrozenxid value for TOAST tables
was not correctly copied into the new installation during
pg_upgrade. This could
later result in pg_clog
files being discarded while they were still needed to
validate tuples in the TOAST tables, leading to
“could not access
status of transaction” failures.
This error poses a significant risk of data loss for installations that have been upgraded with pg_upgrade. This patch corrects the problem for future uses of pg_upgrade, but does not in itself cure the issue in installations that have been processed with a buggy version of pg_upgrade.
Suppress incorrect “PD_ALL_VISIBLE flag was incorrectly set” warning (Heikki Linnakangas)
VACUUM would sometimes
issue this warning in cases that are actually valid.
Use better SQLSTATE error codes for hot standby conflict cases (Tatsuo Ishii and Simon Riggs)
All retryable conflict errors now have an error code
that indicates that a retry is possible. Also, session
closure due to the database being dropped on the master
is now reported as ERRCODE_DATABASE_DROPPED, rather than
ERRCODE_ADMIN_SHUTDOWN, so
that connection poolers can handle the situation
correctly.
Prevent intermittent hang in interactions of startup process with bgwriter process (Simon Riggs)
This affected recovery in non-hot-standby cases.
Disallow including a composite type in itself (Tom Lane)
This prevents scenarios wherein the server could recurse infinitely while processing the composite type. While there are some possible uses for such a structure, they don't seem compelling enough to justify the effort required to make sure it always works safely.
Avoid potential deadlock during catalog cache initialization (Nikhil Sontakke)
In some cases the cache loading code would acquire share lock on a system index before locking the index's catalog. This could deadlock against processes trying to acquire exclusive locks in the other, more standard order.
Fix dangling-pointer problem in BEFORE ROW UPDATE trigger handling when
there was a concurrent update to the target tuple (Tom
Lane)
This bug has been observed to result in intermittent
“cannot extract
system attribute from virtual tuple”
failures while trying to do UPDATE
RETURNING ctid. There is a very small probability
of more serious errors, such as generating incorrect
index entries for the updated tuple.
Disallow DROP TABLE when
there are pending deferred trigger events for the table
(Tom Lane)
Formerly the DROP would
go through, leading to “could not open relation with OID
nnn” errors when the triggers were
eventually fired.
Allow “replication” as a user name in
pg_hba.conf (Andrew
Dunstan)
“replication” is special in the database name column, but it was mistakenly also treated as special in the user name column.
Prevent crash triggered by constant-false WHERE conditions during GEQO optimization (Tom Lane)
Improve planner's handling of semi-join and anti-join cases (Tom Lane)
Fix handling of SELECT FOR
UPDATE in a sub-SELECT (Tom Lane)
This bug typically led to “cannot extract system attribute from virtual tuple” errors.
Fix selectivity estimation for text search to account for NULLs (Jesper Krogh)
Fix get_actual_variable_range() to support hypothetical indexes injected by an index adviser plugin (Gurjeet Singh)
Fix PL/Python memory leak involving array slices (Daniel Popowich)
Allow libpq's SSL initialization to succeed when user's home directory is unavailable (Tom Lane)
If the SSL mode is such that a root certificate file is not required, there is no need to fail. This change restores the behavior to what it was in pre-9.0 releases.
Fix libpq to return a
useful error message for errors detected in conninfo_array_parse (Joseph Adams)
A typo caused the library to return NULL, rather than
the PGconn structure
containing the error message, to the application.
Fix ecpg preprocessor's handling of float constants (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix parallel pg_restore to handle comments on POST_DATA items correctly (Arnd Hannemann)
Fix pg_restore to cope with long lines (over 1KB) in TOC files (Tom Lane)
Put in more safeguards against crashing due to division-by-zero with overly enthusiastic compiler optimization (Aurelien Jarno)
Support use of dlopen() in FreeBSD and OpenBSD on MIPS (Tom Lane)
There was a hard-wired assumption that this system function was not available on MIPS hardware on these systems. Use a compile-time test instead, since more recent versions have it.
Fix compilation failures on HP-UX (Heikki Linnakangas)
Avoid crash when trying to write to the Windows console very early in process startup (Rushabh Lathia)
Support building with MinGW 64 bit compiler for Windows (Andrew Dunstan)
Fix version-incompatibility problem with libintl on Windows (Hiroshi Inoue)
Fix usage of xcopy in Windows build scripts to work correctly under Windows 7 (Andrew Dunstan)
This affects the build scripts only, not installation or usage.
Fix path separator used by pg_regress on Cygwin (Andrew Dunstan)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2011f for DST law changes in Chile, Cuba, Falkland Islands, Morocco, Samoa, and Turkey; also historical corrections for South Australia, Alaska, and Hawaii.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.1 released on 2011-09-12 - docs
Support unlogged tables using the UNLOGGED option in CREATE
TABLE (Robert Haas)
Such tables provide better update performance than regular tables, but are not crash-safe: their contents are automatically cleared in case of a server crash. Their contents do not propagate to replication slaves, either.
Allow FULL OUTER JOIN
to be implemented as a hash join, and allow either
side of a LEFT OUTER
JOIN or RIGHT OUTER
JOIN to be hashed (Tom Lane)
Previously FULL OUTER
JOIN could only be implemented as a merge
join, and LEFT OUTER
JOIN and RIGHT OUTER
JOIN could hash only the nullable side of the
join. These changes provide additional query
optimization possibilities.
Merge duplicate fsync requests (Robert Haas, Greg Smith)
This greatly improves performance under heavy write loads.
Improve performance of
commit_siblings (Greg Smith)
This allows the use of commit_siblings with less
overhead.
Reduce the memory requirement for large ispell dictionaries (Pavel Stehule, Tom Lane)
Avoid leaving data files open after “blind writes” (Alvaro Herrera)
This fixes scenarios in which backends might hold files open long after they were deleted, preventing the kernel from reclaiming disk space.
Allow inheritance table scans to return meaningfully-sorted results (Greg Stark, Hans-Jurgen Schonig, Robert Haas, Tom Lane)
This allows better optimization of queries that
use ORDER BY,
LIMIT, or MIN/MAX
with inherited tables.
Improve GIN index scan cost estimation (Teodor Sigaev)
Improve cost estimation for aggregates and window functions (Tom Lane)
Support host names and host suffixes (e.g.
.example.com) in
pg_hba.conf (Peter
Eisentraut)
Previously only host IP addresses and CIDR values were supported.
Support the key word all in the host column of pg_hba.conf (Peter
Eisentraut)
Previously people used 0.0.0.0/0 or ::/0 for this.
Reject local lines in
pg_hba.conf on platforms that
don't support Unix-socket connections (Magnus
Hagander)
Formerly, such lines were silently ignored, which could be surprising. This makes the behavior more like other unsupported cases.
Allow GSSAPI to be used to authenticate to servers via SSPI (Christian Ullrich)
Specifically this allows Unix-based GSSAPI clients to do SSPI authentication with Windows servers.
ident authentication over local
sockets is now known as peer (Magnus Hagander)
The old term is still accepted for backward compatibility, but since the two methods are fundamentally different, it seemed better to adopt different names for them.
Rewrite peer authentication to avoid use of credential control messages (Tom Lane)
This change makes the peer authentication code
simpler and better-performing. However, it requires
the platform to provide the getpeereid function or an
equivalent socket operation. So far as is known, the
only platform for which peer authentication worked
before and now will not is pre-5.0 NetBSD.
Add details to the logging of restartpoints and
checkpoints, which is controlled by
log_checkpoints (Fujii Masao, Greg
Smith)
New details include WAL file and sync activity.
Add
log_file_mode which controls the
permissions on log files created by the logging
collector (Martin Pihlak)
Reduce the default maximum line length for syslog logging to 900 bytes plus prefixes (Noah Misch)
This avoids truncation of long log lines on syslog implementations that have a 1KB length limit, rather than the more common 2KB.
Add client_hostname column to
pg_stat_activity (Peter Eisentraut)
Previously only the client address was reported.
Add
pg_stat_xact_* statistics functions and
views (Joel Jacobson)
These are like the database-wide statistics counter views, but reflect counts for only the current transaction.
Add time of last reset in database-level and background writer statistics views (Tomas Vondra)
Add columns showing the number of vacuum and
analyze operations in
pg_stat_*_tables views (Magnus
Hagander)
Add buffers_backend_fsync column to
pg_stat_bgwriter (Greg Smith)
This new column counts the number of times a backend fsyncs a buffer.
Provide auto-tuning of
wal_buffers (Greg Smith)
By default, the value of wal_buffers is now chosen
automatically based on the value of shared_buffers.
Increase the maximum values for
deadlock_timeout,
log_min_duration_statement, and
log_autovacuum_min_duration
(Peter Eisentraut)
The maximum value for each of these parameters was previously only about 35 minutes. Much larger values are now allowed.
Allow synchronous replication (Simon Riggs, Fujii Masao)
This allows the primary server to wait for a
standby to write a transaction's information to disk
before acknowledging the commit. One standby at a
time can take the role of the synchronous standby, as
controlled by the
synchronous_standby_names
setting. Synchronous replication can be enabled or
disabled on a per-transaction basis using the
synchronous_commit setting.
Add protocol support for sending file system backups to standby servers using the streaming replication network connection (Magnus Hagander, Heikki Linnakangas)
This avoids the requirement of manually transferring a file system backup when setting up a standby server.
Add replication_timeout setting (Fujii
Masao, Heikki Linnakangas)
Replication connections that are idle for more
than the replication_timeout interval will be
terminated automatically. Formerly, a failed
connection was typically not detected until the TCP
timeout elapsed, which is inconveniently long in many
situations.
Add command-line tool pg_basebackup for creating a new standby server or database backup (Magnus Hagander)
Add a replication permission for roles (Magnus Hagander)
This is a read-only permission used for streaming replication. It allows a non-superuser role to be used for replication connections. Previously only superusers could initiate replication connections; superusers still have this permission by default.
Add system view
pg_stat_replication which displays
activity of WAL
sender processes (Itagaki Takahiro, Simon Riggs)
This reports the status of all connected standby servers.
Add monitoring function
pg_last_xact_replay_timestamp()
(Fujii Masao)
This returns the time at which the primary generated the most recent commit or abort record applied on the standby.
Add configuration parameter
hot_standby_feedback
to enable standbys to postpone cleanup of old row
versions on the primary (Simon Riggs)
This helps avoid canceling long-running queries on the standby.
Add the
pg_stat_database_conflicts system view to
show queries that have been canceled and the reason
(Magnus Hagander)
Cancellations can occur because of dropped tablespaces, lock timeouts, old snapshots, pinned buffers, and deadlocks.
Add a conflicts
count to
pg_stat_database (Magnus Hagander)
This is the number of conflicts that occurred in the database.
Increase the maximum values for
max_standby_archive_delay and
max_standby_streaming_delay
The maximum value for each of these parameters was previously only about 35 minutes. Much larger values are now allowed.
Add
ERRCODE_T_R_DATABASE_DROPPED error code to
report recovery conflicts due to dropped databases
(Tatsuo Ishii)
This is useful for connection pooling software.
Add functions to control streaming replication replay (Simon Riggs)
The new functions are
pg_xlog_replay_pause(),
pg_xlog_replay_resume(), and the status
function
pg_is_xlog_replay_paused().
Add recovery.conf
setting pause_at_recovery_target to pause
recovery at target (Simon Riggs)
This allows a recovery server to be queried to check whether the recovery point is the one desired.
Add the ability to create named restore points
using
pg_create_restore_point() (Jaime
Casanova)
These named restore points can be specified as
recovery targets using the new recovery.conf setting
recovery_target_name.
Allow standby recovery to switch to a new timeline automatically (Heikki Linnakangas)
Now standby servers scan the archive directory for new timelines periodically.
Add
restart_after_crash
setting which disables automatic server restart after
a backend crash (Robert Haas)
This allows external cluster management software to control whether the database server restarts or not.
Allow
recovery.conf to use the same quoting
behavior as postgresql.conf (Dimitri
Fontaine)
Previously all values had to be quoted.
Add a true serializable isolation level (Kevin Grittner, Dan Ports)
Previously, asking for serializable isolation
guaranteed only that a single MVCC snapshot would be
used for the entire transaction, which allowed certain
documented anomalies. The old snapshot isolation
behavior is still available by requesting the
REPEATABLE READ isolation level.
Allow data-modification commands (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) in
WITH clauses (Marko Tiikkaja, Hitoshi
Harada)
These commands can use RETURNING to pass data up to the
containing query.
Allow
WITH clauses to be
attached to INSERT,
UPDATE, DELETE statements (Marko Tiikkaja,
Hitoshi Harada)
Allow non-GROUP
BY columns in the query target list when the
primary key is specified in the GROUP BY clause (Peter Eisentraut)
The SQL standard allows this behavior, and because of the primary key, the result is unambiguous.
Allow use of the key word DISTINCT in UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT clauses (Tom Lane)
DISTINCT is the default
behavior so use of this key word is redundant, but the
SQL standard allows it.
Fix ordinary queries with rules to use the same
snapshot behavior as EXPLAIN
ANALYZE (Marko Tiikkaja)
Previously EXPLAIN
ANALYZE used slightly different snapshot timing
for queries involving rules. The EXPLAIN ANALYZE behavior was judged to
be more logical.
Add per-column collation support (Peter Eisentraut, Tom Lane)
Previously collation (the sort ordering of text
strings) could only be chosen at database creation.
Collation can now be set per column, domain, index,
or expression, via the SQL-standard COLLATE clause.
Add extensions which simplify packaging of additions to PostgreSQL (Dimitri Fontaine, Tom Lane)
Extensions are controlled by the new CREATE/ALTER/DROP
EXTENSION commands. This replaces ad-hoc
methods of grouping objects that are added to a
PostgreSQL
installation.
Add support for foreign tables (Shigeru Hanada, Robert Haas, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas)
This allows data stored outside the database to be used like native PostgreSQL-stored data. Foreign tables are currently read-only, however.
Allow new values to be added to an existing enum
type via ALTER
TYPE (Andrew Dunstan)
Add ALTER TYPE ...
ADD/DROP/ALTER/RENAME ATTRIBUTE (Peter
Eisentraut)
This allows modification of composite types.
Add RESTRICT/CASCADE to ALTER TYPE operations on typed
tables (Peter Eisentraut)
This controls ADD/DROP/ALTER/RENAME
ATTRIBUTE cascading behavior.
Support ALTER TABLE
(Noah
Misch)name {OF |
NOT OF} type
This syntax allows a standalone table to be made into a typed table, or a typed table to be made standalone.
Add support for more object types in ALTER ... SET SCHEMA commands
(Dimitri Fontaine)
This command is now supported for conversions, operators, operator classes, operator families, text search configurations, text search dictionaries, text search parsers, and text search templates.
Add ALTER TABLE ... ADD
UNIQUE/PRIMARY KEY USING INDEX (Gurjeet
Singh)
This allows a primary key or unique constraint to be defined using an existing unique index, including a concurrently created unique index.
Allow ALTER TABLE to
add foreign keys without validation (Simon Riggs)
The new option is called NOT
VALID. The constraint's state can later be
modified to VALIDATED
and validation checks performed. Together these allow
you to add a foreign key with minimal impact on read
and write operations.
Allow ALTER TABLE
... SET DATA TYPE to avoid table rewrites
in appropriate cases (Noah Misch, Robert Haas)
For example, converting a varchar column to text no longer requires a rewrite of
the table. However, increasing the length constraint
on a varchar column still
requires a table rewrite.
Add CREATE
TABLE IF NOT EXISTS syntax (Robert
Haas)
This allows table creation without causing an error if the table already exists.
Fix possible “tuple concurrently updated” error when two backends attempt to add an inheritance child to the same table at the same time (Robert Haas)
ALTER
TABLE now takes a stronger lock on the
parent table, so that the sessions cannot try to
update it simultaneously.
Add a SECURITY
LABEL command (KaiGai Kohei)
This allows security labels to be assigned to objects.
Add transaction-level advisory locks (Marko Tiikkaja)
These are similar to the existing session-level advisory locks, but such locks are automatically released at transaction end.
Make TRUNCATE ... RESTART
IDENTITY restart sequences transactionally
(Steve Singer)
Previously the counter could have been left out of sync if a backend crashed between the on-commit truncation activity and commit completion.
Add ENCODING option
to COPY TO/FROM
(Hitoshi Harada, Itagaki Takahiro)
This allows the encoding of the COPY file to be specified separately
from client encoding.
Add bidirectional COPY protocol support (Fujii
Masao)
This is currently only used by streaming replication.
Make EXPLAIN VERBOSE
show the function call expression in a FunctionScan node (Tom Lane)
Add additional details to the output of VACUUM FULL
VERBOSE and CLUSTER VERBOSE (Itagaki
Takahiro)
New information includes the live and dead tuple
count and whether CLUSTER is using an index to
rebuild.
Prevent autovacuum from waiting if it cannot acquire a table lock (Robert Haas)
It will try to vacuum that table later.
Allow CLUSTER to sort
the table rather than scanning the index when it
seems likely to be cheaper (Leonardo Francalanci)
Add nearest-neighbor (order-by-operator) searching to GiST indexes (Teodor Sigaev, Tom Lane)
This allows GiST indexes to quickly return
the N
closest values in a query with LIMIT. For example
SELECT * FROM places ORDER BY location <-> point '(101,456)' LIMIT 10;
finds the ten places closest to a given target point.
Allow GIN indexes to index null and empty values (Tom Lane)
This allows full GIN index scans, and fixes various corner cases in which GIN scans would fail.
Allow GIN indexes to better recognize duplicate search entries (Tom Lane)
This reduces the cost of index scans, especially in cases where it avoids unnecessary full index scans.
Fix GiST indexes to be fully crash-safe (Heikki Linnakangas)
Previously there were rare cases where a
REINDEX would be
required (you would be informed).
Allow numeric to use a
more compact, two-byte header in common cases (Robert
Haas)
Previously all numeric
values had four-byte headers; this change saves on disk
storage.
Add support for dividing money by money
(Andy Balholm)
Allow binary I/O on type void (Radoslaw Smogura)
Improve hypotenuse calculations for geometric operators (Paul Matthews)
This avoids unnecessary overflows, and may also be more accurate.
Support hashing array values (Tom Lane)
This provides additional query optimization possibilities.
Don't treat a composite type as sortable unless all its column types are sortable (Tom Lane)
This avoids possible “could not identify a
comparison function” failures at runtime,
if it is possible to implement the query without
sorting. Also, ANALYZE
won't try to use inappropriate statistics-gathering
methods for columns of such composite types.
Add support for casting between money and numeric (Andy Balholm)
Add support for casting from int4 and int8
to money (Joey Adams)
Allow casting a table's row type to the table's supertype if it's a typed table (Peter Eisentraut)
This is analogous to the existing facility that allows casting a row type to a supertable's row type.
Add XML
function XMLEXISTS and xpath_exists() functions (Mike
Fowler)
These are used for XPath matching.
Add XML
functions xml_is_well_formed(),
xml_is_well_formed_document(),
xml_is_well_formed_content() (Mike
Fowler)
These check whether the input is properly-formed
XML. They provide
functionality that was previously available only in
the deprecated contrib/xml2 module.
Add SQL function format(text, ...), which behaves
analogously to C's printf() (Pavel Stehule, Robert
Haas)
It currently supports formats for strings, SQL literals, and SQL identifiers.
Add string functions
concat(),
concat_ws(),
left(),
right(), and
reverse() (Pavel Stehule)
These improve compatibility with other database products.
Add function
pg_read_binary_file() to read binary files
(Dimitri Fontaine, Itagaki Takahiro)
Add a single-parameter version of function
pg_read_file() to read an entire file
(Dimitri Fontaine, Itagaki Takahiro)
Add three-parameter forms of array_to_string() and string_to_array() for null value
processing control (Pavel Stehule)
Add the
pg_describe_object() function
(Alvaro Herrera)
This function is used to obtain a human-readable
string describing an object, based on the pg_class OID, object OID, and
sub-object ID. It can be used to help interpret the
contents of pg_depend.
Update comments for built-in operators and their underlying functions (Tom Lane)
Functions that are meant to be used via an associated operator are now commented as such.
Add variable
quote_all_identifiers to force
the quoting of all identifiers in EXPLAIN and in system catalog
functions like
pg_get_viewdef()
(Robert Haas)
This makes exporting schemas to tools and other databases with different quoting rules easier.
Add columns to the information_schema.sequences
system view (Peter Eisentraut)
Previously, though the view existed, the columns about the sequence parameters were unimplemented.
Allow public as a
pseudo-role name in
has_table_privilege() and
related functions (Alvaro Herrera)
This allows checking for public permissions.
Support INSTEAD
OF triggers on views (Dean Rasheed)
This feature can be used to implement fully updatable views.
Add FOREACH IN ARRAY to PL/pgSQL
(Pavel Stehule)
This is more efficient and readable than previous methods of iterating through the elements of an array value.
Allow RAISE without
parameters to be caught in the same places that could
catch a RAISE ERROR from
the same location (Piyush Newe)
The previous coding threw the error from the block containing the active exception handler. The new behavior is more consistent with other DBMS products.
Allow generic record arguments to PL/Perl functions (Andrew Dunstan)
PL/Perl functions can now be declared to accept
type record. The behavior
is the same as for any named composite type.
Convert PL/Perl array arguments to Perl arrays (Alexey Klyukin, Alex Hunsaker)
String representations are still available.
Convert PL/Perl composite-type arguments to Perl hashes (Alexey Klyukin, Alex Hunsaker)
String representations are still available.
Add table function support for PL/Python (Jan Urbanski)
PL/Python can now return multiple OUT parameters and record sets.
Add a validator to PL/Python (Jan Urbanski)
This allows PL/Python functions to be syntax-checked at function creation time.
Allow exceptions for SQL queries in PL/Python (Jan Urbanski)
This allows access to SQL-generated exception error codes from PL/Python exception blocks.
Add explicit subtransactions to PL/Python (Jan Urbanski)
Add PL/Python functions for quoting strings (Jan Urbanski)
These functions are plpy.quote_ident, plpy.quote_literal, and
plpy.quote_nullable.
Add traceback information to PL/Python errors (Jan Urbanski)
Report PL/Python errors from iterators with
PLy_elog (Jan
Urbanski)
Fix exception handling with Python 3 (Jan Urbanski)
Exception classes were previously not available in
plpy under Python 3.
Mark createlang and droplang as deprecated now that they just invoke extension commands (Tom Lane)
Add psql command
\conninfo to show
current connection information (David
Christensen)
Add psql command
\sf to show a function's
definition (Pavel Stehule)
Add psql command
\dL to list languages
(Fernando Ike)
Add the S
(“system”) option to psql's \dn (list schemas) command (Tom
Lane)
\dn without
S now suppresses system
schemas.
Allow psql's
\e and \ef commands to accept a line number
to be used to position the cursor in the editor
(Pavel Stehule)
This is passed to the editor according to the
PSQL_EDITOR_LINENUMBER_ARG
environment variable.
Have psql set the client encoding from the operating system locale by default (Heikki Linnakangas)
This only happens if the PGCLIENTENCODING environment variable
is not set.
Make \d distinguish
between unique indexes and unique constraints (Josh
Kupershmidt)
Make \dt+ report
pg_table_size instead
of pg_relation_size
when talking to 9.0 or later servers (Bernd
Helmle)
This is a more useful measure of table size, but note that it is not identical to what was previously reported in the same display.
Additional tab completion support (Itagaki Takahiro, Pavel Stehule, Andrey Popp, Christoph Berg, David Fetter, Josh Kupershmidt)
Add pg_dump and pg_dumpall option
--quote-all-identifiers
to force quoting of all identifiers (Robert Haas)
Add directory format
to pg_dump (Joachim
Wieland, Heikki Linnakangas)
This is internally similar to the tar pg_dump format.
Fix pg_ctl so it no longer incorrectly reports that the server is not running (Bruce Momjian)
Previously this could happen if the server was running but pg_ctl could not authenticate.
Improve pg_ctl
start's “wait” (-w) option (Bruce Momjian, Tom
Lane)
The wait mode is now significantly more robust. It will not get confused by non-default postmaster port numbers, non-default Unix-domain socket locations, permission problems, or stale postmaster lock files.
Add promote option to
pg_ctl to switch a
standby server to primary (Fujii Masao)
Add a libpq connection option
client_encoding
which behaves like the PGCLIENTENCODING environment variable
(Heikki Linnakangas)
The value auto sets
the client encoding based on the operating system
locale.
Add PQlibVersion() function which
returns the libpq library version (Magnus
Hagander)
libpq already had PQserverVersion() which returns the
server version.
Allow libpq-using clients to check the user name
of the server process when connecting via Unix-domain
sockets, with the new
requirepeer connection option (Peter
Eisentraut)
PostgreSQL already allowed servers to check the client user name when connecting via Unix-domain sockets.
Add PQping() and PQpingParams() to libpq (Bruce
Momjian, Tom Lane)
These functions allow detection of the server's status without trying to open a new session.
Allow ECPG to accept dynamic cursor names even in
WHERE CURRENT OF clauses
(Zoltan Boszormenyi)
Make ecpglib
write double values with a
precision of 15 digits, not 14 as formerly (Akira
Kurosawa)
Use +Olibmerrno compile
flag with HP-UX C compilers that accept it (Ibrar
Ahmed)
This avoids possible misbehavior of math library calls on recent HP platforms.
Improved parallel make support (Peter Eisentraut)
This allows for faster compiles. Also,
make -k now works more
consistently.
Require GNU make 3.80 or newer (Peter Eisentraut)
This is necessary because of the parallel-make improvements.
Add make
maintainer-check target (Peter Eisentraut)
This target performs various source code checks that are not appropriate for either the build or the regression tests. Currently: duplicate_oids, SGML syntax and tabs check, NLS syntax check.
Support make check in
contrib (Peter
Eisentraut)
Formerly only make
installcheck worked, but now there is support
for testing in a temporary installation. The
top-level make
check-world target now includes testing
contrib this way.
On Windows, allow pg_ctl to register the service as auto-start or start-on-demand (Quan Zongliang)
Add support for collecting crash dumps on Windows (Craig Ringer, Magnus Hagander)
minidumps can now be generated by non-debug Windows binaries and analyzed by standard debugging tools.
Enable building with the MinGW64 compiler (Andrew Dunstan)
This allows building 64-bit Windows binaries even on non-Windows platforms via cross-compiling.
Revise the API for GUC variable assign hooks (Tom Lane)
The previous functions of assign hooks are now split between check hooks and assign hooks, where the former can fail but the latter shouldn't. This change will impact add-on modules that define custom GUC parameters.
Add latches to the source code to support waiting for events (Heikki Linnakangas)
Centralize data modification permissions-checking logic (KaiGai Kohei)
Add missing get_
functions, for consistency (Robert Haas)object_oid()
Improve ability to use C++ compilers for compiling add-on modules by removing conflicting key words (Tom Lane)
Add support for DragonFly BSD (Rumko)
Expose quote_literal_cstr() for backend use
(Robert Haas)
Run regression tests in the default encoding (Peter Eisentraut)
Regression tests were previously always run with
SQL_ASCII encoding.
Add src/tools/git_changelog to replace cvs2cl and pgcvslog (Robert Haas, Tom Lane)
Add git-external-diff script to
src/tools (Bruce
Momjian)
This is used to generate context diffs from git.
Improve support for building with Clang (Peter Eisentraut)
Add source code hooks to check permissions (Robert Haas, Stephen Frost)
Add post-object-creation function hooks for use by security frameworks (KaiGai Kohei)
Add a client authentication hook (KaiGai Kohei)
Modify contrib modules
and procedural languages to install via the new
extension mechanism (Tom Lane, Dimitri
Fontaine)
Add contrib/file_fdw foreign-data
wrapper (Shigeru Hanada)
Foreign tables using this foreign data wrapper can
read flat files in a manner very similar to
COPY.
Add nearest-neighbor search support to contrib/pg_trgm and contrib/btree_gist (Teodor
Sigaev)
Add contrib/btree_gist support for
searching on not-equals (Jeff Davis)
Fix contrib/fuzzystrmatch's
levenshtein() function to
handle multibyte characters (Alexander Korotkov)
Add ssl_cipher() and
ssl_version() functions
to contrib/sslinfo (Robert Haas)
Fix contrib/intarray and contrib/hstore to give consistent
results with indexed empty arrays (Tom Lane)
Previously an empty-array query that used an index might return different results from one that used a sequential scan.
Allow contrib/intarray to work properly
on multidimensional arrays (Tom Lane)
In contrib/intarray, avoid errors
complaining about the presence of nulls in cases where
no nulls are actually present (Tom Lane)
In contrib/intarray, fix behavior of
containment operators with respect to empty arrays (Tom
Lane)
Empty arrays are now correctly considered to be contained in any other array.
Remove contrib/xml2's arbitrary limit on
the number of parameter=value pairs that can be
handled by xslt_process()
(Pavel Stehule)
The previous limit was 10.
In contrib/pageinspect, fix
heap_page_item to return infomasks as 32-bit values
(Alvaro Herrera)
This avoids returning negative values, which was confusing. The underlying value is a 16-bit unsigned integer.
Add contrib/sepgsql to interface
permission checks with SELinux (KaiGai Kohei)
This uses the new SECURITY
LABEL facility.
Add contrib module auth_delay (KaiGai Kohei)
This causes the server to pause before returning authentication failure; it is designed to make brute force password attacks more difficult.
Add dummy_seclabel
contrib module (KaiGai Kohei)
This is used for permission regression testing.
Add support for LIKE
and ILIKE index searches
to contrib/pg_trgm (Alexander
Korotkov)
Add levenshtein_less_equal() function
to contrib/fuzzystrmatch, which is
optimized for small distances (Alexander
Korotkov)
Improve performance of index lookups on contrib/seg columns (Alexander
Korotkov)
Improve performance of pg_upgrade for databases with many relations (Bruce Momjian)
Add flag to contrib/pgbench to report
per-statement latencies (Florian Pflug)
Move src/tools/test_fsync to contrib/pg_test_fsync (Bruce
Momjian, Tom Lane)
Add O_DIRECT support
to contrib/pg_test_fsync (Bruce
Momjian)
This matches the use of O_DIRECT by
wal_sync_method.
Add new tests to contrib/pg_test_fsync (Bruce
Momjian)
Extensive ECPG documentation improvements (Satoshi Nagayasu)
Extensive proofreading and documentation improvements (Thom Brown, Josh Kupershmidt, Susanne Ebrecht)
Add documentation for
exit_on_error (Robert Haas)
This parameter causes sessions to exit on any error.
Add documentation for
pg_options_to_table()
(Josh Berkus)
This function shows table storage options in a readable form.
Document that it is possible to access all composite
type fields using (compositeval).* syntax (Peter
Eisentraut)
Document that
translate() removes characters in
from that don't have a
corresponding to character
(Josh Kupershmidt)
Merge documentation for CREATE
CONSTRAINT TRIGGER and CREATE
TRIGGER (Alvaro Herrera)
Centralize permission and upgrade documentation (Bruce Momjian)
Add kernel tuning documentation for Solaris 10 (Josh Berkus)
Previously only Solaris 9 kernel tuning was documented.
Handle non-ASCII characters consistently in
HISTORY file (Peter
Eisentraut)
While the HISTORY file
is in English, we do have to deal with non-ASCII
letters in contributor names. These are now
transliterated so that they are reasonably legible
without assumptions about character set.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.1.1 released on 2011-09-26 - docs
Make pg_options_to_table
return NULL for an option with no value (Tom Lane)
Previously such cases would result in a server crash.
Fix memory leak at end of a GiST index scan (Tom Lane)
Commands that perform many separate GiST index scans, such as verification of a new GiST-based exclusion constraint on a table already containing many rows, could transiently require large amounts of memory due to this leak.
Fix explicit reference to pg_temp schema in CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE (Robert Haas)
This used to be allowed, but failed in 9.1.0.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.1.2 released on 2011-12-05 - docs
Fix bugs in information_schema.referential_constraints
view (Tom Lane)
This view was being insufficiently careful about matching the foreign-key constraint to the depended-on primary or unique key constraint. That could result in failure to show a foreign key constraint at all, or showing it multiple times, or claiming that it depends on a different constraint than the one it really does.
Since the view definition is installed by initdb, merely upgrading will not
fix the problem. If you need to fix this in an existing
installation, you can (as a superuser) drop the
information_schema schema
then re-create it by sourcing SHAREDIR/information_schema.sqlpg_config --sharedir if
you're uncertain where SHAREDIR is.) This must
be repeated in each database to be fixed.
Make contrib/citext's
upgrade script fix collations of citext columns and indexes (Tom Lane)
Existing citext columns and
indexes aren't correctly marked as being of a collatable
data type during pg_upgrade from a pre-9.1 server, or
when a pre-9.1 dump containing the citext type is loaded into a 9.1 server.
That leads to operations on these columns failing with
errors such as “could not determine which collation to use for
string comparison”. This change allows them
to be fixed by the same script that upgrades the
citext module into a proper 9.1
extension during CREATE EXTENSION
citext FROM unpackaged.
If you have a previously-upgraded database that is
suffering from this problem, and you already ran the
CREATE EXTENSION command,
you can manually run (as superuser) the UPDATE commands found at the end of
SHAREDIR/extension/citext--unpackaged--1.0.sqlpg_config --sharedir if
you're uncertain where SHAREDIR is.) There is no
harm in doing this again if unsure.
Fix possible crash during UPDATE or DELETE that joins to the output of a
scalar-returning function (Tom Lane)
A crash could only occur if the target row had been concurrently updated, so this problem surfaced only intermittently.
Fix incorrect replay of WAL records for GIN index updates (Tom Lane)
This could result in transiently failing to find index
entries after a crash, or on a hot-standby server. The
problem would be repaired by the next VACUUM of the index, however.
Fix TOAST-related data corruption during CREATE TABLE dest AS SELECT * FROM src
or INSERT INTO dest SELECT * FROM
src (Tom Lane)
If a table has been modified by ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN, attempts to copy
its data verbatim to another table could produce corrupt
results in certain corner cases. The problem can only
manifest in this precise form in 8.4 and later, but we
patched earlier versions as well in case there are other
code paths that could trigger the same bug.
Fix possible failures during hot standby startup (Simon Riggs)
Start hot standby faster when initial snapshot is incomplete (Simon Riggs)
Fix race condition during toast table access from stale syscache entries (Tom Lane)
The typical symptom was transient errors like “missing chunk number 0 for toast value NNNNN in pg_toast_2619”, where the cited toast table would always belong to a system catalog.
Track dependencies of functions on items used in parameter default expressions (Tom Lane)
Previously, a referenced object could be dropped
without having dropped or modified the function, leading
to misbehavior when the function was used. Note that
merely installing this update will not fix the missing
dependency entries; to do that, you'd need to
CREATE OR REPLACE each such
function afterwards. If you have functions whose defaults
depend on non-built-in objects, doing so is
recommended.
Fix incorrect management of placeholder variables in nestloop joins (Tom Lane)
This bug is known to lead to “variable not found in subplan target list” planner errors, and could possibly result in wrong query output when outer joins are involved.
Fix window functions that sort by expressions involving aggregates (Tom Lane)
Previously these could fail with “could not find pathkey item to sort” planner errors.
Fix “MergeAppend child's targetlist doesn't match MergeAppend” planner errors (Tom Lane)
Fix index matching for operators with both collatable and noncollatable inputs (Tom Lane)
In 9.1.0, an indexable operator that has a
non-collatable left-hand input type and a collatable
right-hand input type would not be recognized as matching
the left-hand column's index. An example is the
hstore ? text
operator.
Allow inlining of set-returning SQL functions with multiple OUT parameters (Tom Lane)
Don't trust deferred-unique indexes for join removal (Tom Lane and Marti Raudsepp)
A deferred uniqueness constraint might not hold intra-transaction, so assuming that it does could give incorrect query results.
Make DatumGetInetP()
unpack inet datums that have a 1-byte header, and add a
new macro, DatumGetInetPP(), that does not (Heikki
Linnakangas)
This change affects no core code, but might prevent
crashes in add-on code that expects DatumGetInetP() to produce an unpacked
datum as per usual convention.
Improve locale support in money type's input and output (Tom
Lane)
Aside from not supporting all standard lc_monetary formatting options, the
input and output functions were inconsistent, meaning
there were locales in which dumped money values could not be re-read.
Don't let
transform_null_equals
affect CASE foo WHEN NULL
... constructs (Heikki Linnakangas)
transform_null_equals is
only supposed to affect foo =
NULL expressions written directly by the user, not
equality checks generated internally by this form of
CASE.
Change foreign-key trigger creation order to better support self-referential foreign keys (Tom Lane)
For a cascading foreign key that references its own
table, a row update will fire both the ON UPDATE trigger and the CHECK trigger as one event. The
ON UPDATE trigger must
execute first, else the CHECK will check a non-final state of
the row and possibly throw an inappropriate error.
However, the firing order of these triggers is determined
by their names, which generally sort in creation order
since the triggers have auto-generated names following
the convention “RI_ConstraintTrigger_NNNN”. A
proper fix would require modifying that convention, which
we will do in 9.2, but it seems risky to change it in
existing releases. So this patch just changes the
creation order of the triggers. Users encountering this
type of error should drop and re-create the foreign key
constraint to get its triggers into the right order.
Fix IF EXISTS to work
correctly in DROP OPERATOR
FAMILY (Robert Haas)
Disallow dropping of an extension from within its own script (Tom Lane)
This prevents odd behavior in case of incorrect management of extension dependencies.
Don't mark auto-generated types as extension members (Robert Haas)
Relation rowtypes and automatically-generated array
types do not need to have their own extension membership
entries in pg_depend, and
creating such entries complicates matters for extension
upgrades.
Cope with invalid pre-existing search_path settings during CREATE EXTENSION (Tom Lane)
Avoid floating-point underflow while tracking buffer allocation rate (Greg Matthews)
While harmless in itself, on certain platforms this would result in annoying kernel log messages.
Prevent autovacuum transactions from running in serializable mode (Tom Lane)
Autovacuum formerly used the cluster-wide default transaction isolation level, but there is no need for it to use anything higher than READ COMMITTED, and using SERIALIZABLE could result in unnecessary delays for other processes.
Ensure walsender processes respond promptly to SIGTERM (Magnus Hagander)
Exclude postmaster.opts
from base backups (Magnus Hagander)
Preserve configuration file name and line number values when starting child processes under Windows (Tom Lane)
Formerly, these would not be displayed correctly in
the pg_settings view.
Fix incorrect field alignment in ecpg's SQLDA area (Zoltan Boszormenyi)
Preserve blank lines within commands in psql's command history (Robert Haas)
The former behavior could cause problems if an empty line was removed from within a string literal, for example.
Avoid platform-specific infinite loop in pg_dump (Steve Singer)
Fix compression of plain-text output format in pg_dump (Adrian Klaver and Tom Lane)
pg_dump has
historically understood -Z
with no -F switch to mean
that it should emit a gzip-compressed version of its
plain text output. Restore that behavior.
Fix pg_dump to dump user-defined casts between auto-generated types, such as table rowtypes (Tom Lane)
Fix missed quoting of foreign server names in pg_dump (Tom Lane)
Assorted fixes for pg_upgrade (Bruce Momjian)
Handle exclusion constraints correctly, avoid failures on Windows, don't complain about mismatched toast table names in 8.4 databases.
In PL/pgSQL, allow foreign tables to define row types (Alexander Soudakov)
Fix up conversions of PL/Perl functions' results (Alex Hunsaker and Tom Lane)
Restore the pre-9.1 behavior that PL/Perl functions
returning void ignore the
result value of their last Perl statement; 9.1.0 would
throw an error if that statement returned a reference.
Also, make sure it works to return a string value for a
composite type, so long as the string meets the type's
input format. In addition, throw errors for attempts to
return Perl arrays or hashes when the function's declared
result type is not an array or composite type,
respectively. (Pre-9.1 versions rather uselessly returned
strings like ARRAY(0x221a9a0) or HASH(0x221aa90) in such cases.)
Ensure PL/Perl strings are always correctly UTF8-encoded (Amit Khandekar and Alex Hunsaker)
Use the preferred version of xsubpp to build PL/Perl, not necessarily the operating system's main copy (David Wheeler and Alex Hunsaker)
Correctly propagate SQLSTATE in PL/Python exceptions (Mika Eloranta and Jan Urbanski)
Do not install PL/Python extension files for Python major versions other than the one built against (Peter Eisentraut)
Change all the contrib
extension script files to report a useful error message
if they are fed to psql
(Andrew Dunstan and Tom Lane)
This should help teach people about the new method of
using CREATE EXTENSION to
load these files. In most cases, sourcing the scripts
directly would fail anyway, but with harder-to-interpret
messages.
Fix incorrect coding in contrib/dict_int and contrib/dict_xsyn (Tom Lane)
Some functions incorrectly assumed that memory
returned by palloc() is
guaranteed zeroed.
Remove contrib/sepgsql
tests from the regular regression test mechanism (Tom
Lane)
Since these tests require root privileges for setup, they're impractical to run automatically. Switch over to a manual approach instead, and provide a testing script to help with that.
Fix assorted errors in contrib/unaccent's configuration file
parsing (Tom Lane)
Honor query cancel interrupts promptly in pgstatindex() (Robert Haas)
Fix incorrect quoting of log file name in macOS start script (Sidar Lopez)
Revert unintentional enabling of WAL_DEBUG (Robert Haas)
Fortunately, as debugging tools go, this one is pretty cheap; but it's not intended to be enabled by default, so revert.
Ensure VPATH builds properly install all server header files (Peter Eisentraut)
Shorten file names reported in verbose error messages (Peter Eisentraut)
Regular builds have always reported just the name of the C file containing the error message call, but VPATH builds formerly reported an absolute path name.
Fix interpretation of Windows timezone names for Central America (Tom Lane)
Map “Central
America Standard Time” to CST6, not CST6CDT, because DST is generally not
observed anywhere in Central America.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2011n for DST law changes in Brazil, Cuba, Fiji, Palestine, Russia, and Samoa; also historical corrections for Alaska and British East Africa.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.1.3 released on 2012-02-27 - docs
Require execute permission on the trigger function for
CREATE TRIGGER (Robert
Haas)
This missing check could allow another user to execute
a trigger function with forged input data, by installing
it on a table he owns. This is only of significance for
trigger functions marked SECURITY
DEFINER, since otherwise trigger functions run as
the table owner anyway. (CVE-2012-0866)
Remove arbitrary limitation on length of common name in SSL certificates (Heikki Linnakangas)
Both libpq and the server truncated the common name extracted from an SSL certificate at 32 bytes. Normally this would cause nothing worse than an unexpected verification failure, but there are some rather-implausible scenarios in which it might allow one certificate holder to impersonate another. The victim would have to have a common name exactly 32 bytes long, and the attacker would have to persuade a trusted CA to issue a certificate in which the common name has that string as a prefix. Impersonating a server would also require some additional exploit to redirect client connections. (CVE-2012-0867)
Convert newlines to spaces in names written in pg_dump comments (Robert Haas)
pg_dump was incautious about sanitizing object names that are emitted within SQL comments in its output script. A name containing a newline would at least render the script syntactically incorrect. Maliciously crafted object names could present a SQL injection risk when the script is reloaded. (CVE-2012-0868)
Fix btree index corruption from insertions concurrent with vacuuming (Tom Lane)
An index page split caused by an insertion could
sometimes cause a concurrently-running VACUUM to miss removing index entries
that it should remove. After the corresponding table rows
are removed, the dangling index entries would cause
errors (such as “could not read block N in file
...”) or worse, silently wrong query
results after unrelated rows are re-inserted at the
now-free table locations. This bug has been present since
release 8.2, but occurs so infrequently that it was not
diagnosed until now. If you have reason to suspect that
it has happened in your database, reindexing the affected
index will fix things.
Fix transient zeroing of shared buffers during WAL replay (Tom Lane)
The replay logic would sometimes zero and refill a shared buffer, so that the contents were transiently invalid. In hot standby mode this can result in a query that's executing in parallel seeing garbage data. Various symptoms could result from that, but the most common one seems to be “invalid memory alloc request size”.
Fix handling of data-modifying WITH subplans in READ COMMITTED rechecking (Tom Lane)
A WITH clause containing
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE would crash if the parent
UPDATE or DELETE command needed to be re-evaluated
at one or more rows due to concurrent updates in
READ COMMITTED mode.
Fix corner case in SSI transaction cleanup (Dan Ports)
When finishing up a read-write serializable transaction, a crash could occur if all remaining active serializable transactions are read-only.
Fix postmaster to attempt restart after a hot-standby crash (Tom Lane)
A logic error caused the postmaster to terminate, rather than attempt to restart the cluster, if any backend process crashed while operating in hot standby mode.
Fix CLUSTER/VACUUM FULL handling of toast values
owned by recently-updated rows (Tom Lane)
This oversight could lead to “duplicate key value violates unique constraint” errors being reported against the toast table's index during one of these commands.
Update per-column permissions, not only per-table permissions, when changing table owner (Tom Lane)
Failure to do this meant that any previously granted column permissions were still shown as having been granted by the old owner. This meant that neither the new owner nor a superuser could revoke the now-untraceable-to-table-owner permissions.
Support foreign data wrappers and foreign servers in
REASSIGN OWNED (Alvaro
Herrera)
This command failed with “unexpected classid” errors if it needed to change the ownership of any such objects.
Allow non-existent values for some settings in
ALTER USER/DATABASE SET
(Heikki Linnakangas)
Allow default_text_search_config, default_tablespace, and temp_tablespaces to be set to names that
are not known. This is because they might be known in
another database where the setting is intended to be
used, or for the tablespace cases because the tablespace
might not be created yet. The same issue was previously
recognized for search_path,
and these settings now act like that one.
Fix “unsupported node type” error caused
by COLLATE in an
INSERT expression (Tom
Lane)
Avoid crashing when we have problems deleting table files post-commit (Tom Lane)
Dropping a table should lead to deleting the underlying disk files only after the transaction commits. In event of failure then (for instance, because of wrong file permissions) the code is supposed to just emit a warning message and go on, since it's too late to abort the transaction. This logic got broken as of release 8.4, causing such situations to result in a PANIC and an unrestartable database.
Recover from errors occurring during WAL replay of
DROP TABLESPACE (Tom
Lane)
Replay will attempt to remove the tablespace's directories, but there are various reasons why this might fail (for example, incorrect ownership or permissions on those directories). Formerly the replay code would panic, rendering the database unrestartable without manual intervention. It seems better to log the problem and continue, since the only consequence of failure to remove the directories is some wasted disk space.
Fix race condition in logging AccessExclusiveLocks for hot standby (Simon Riggs)
Sometimes a lock would be logged as being held by “transaction zero”. This is at least known to produce assertion failures on slave servers, and might be the cause of more serious problems.
Track the OID counter correctly during WAL replay, even when it wraps around (Tom Lane)
Previously the OID counter would remain stuck at a high value until the system exited replay mode. The practical consequences of that are usually nil, but there are scenarios wherein a standby server that's been promoted to master might take a long time to advance the OID counter to a reasonable value once values are needed.
Prevent emitting misleading “consistent recovery state reached” log message at the beginning of crash recovery (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix initial value of pg_stat_replication.replay_location (Fujii Masao)
Previously, the value shown would be wrong until at least one WAL record had been replayed.
Fix regular expression back-references with
* attached (Tom Lane)
Rather than enforcing an exact string match, the code would effectively accept any string that satisfies the pattern sub-expression referenced by the back-reference symbol.
A similar problem still afflicts back-references that are embedded in a larger quantified expression, rather than being the immediate subject of the quantifier. This will be addressed in a future PostgreSQL release.
Fix recently-introduced memory leak in processing of
inet/cidr values (Heikki Linnakangas)
A patch in the December 2011 releases of PostgreSQL caused memory leakage in these operations, which could be significant in scenarios such as building a btree index on such a column.
Fix planner's ability to push down index-expression
restrictions through UNION
ALL (Tom Lane)
This type of optimization was inadvertently disabled by a fix for another problem in 9.1.2.
Fix planning of WITH
clauses referenced in UPDATE/DELETE on an inherited table (Tom
Lane)
This bug led to “could not find plan for CTE” failures.
Fix GIN cost estimation to handle column IN (...) index conditions (Marti
Raudsepp)
This oversight would usually lead to crashes if such a condition could be used with a GIN index.
Prevent assertion failure when exiting a session with an open, failed transaction (Tom Lane)
This bug has no impact on normal builds with asserts not enabled.
Fix dangling pointer after CREATE TABLE AS/SELECT INTO in a SQL-language function
(Tom Lane)
In most cases this only led to an assertion failure in assert-enabled builds, but worse consequences seem possible.
Avoid double close of file handle in syslogger on Windows (MauMau)
Ordinarily this error was invisible, but it would cause an exception when running on a debug version of Windows.
Fix I/O-conversion-related memory leaks in plpgsql (Andres Freund, Jan Urbanski, Tom Lane)
Certain operations would leak memory until the end of the current function.
Work around bug in perl's SvPVutf8() function (Andrew Dunstan)
This function crashes when handed a typeglob or
certain read-only objects such as $^V. Make plperl avoid passing those to
it.
In pg_dump, don't dump contents of an extension's configuration tables if the extension itself is not being dumped (Tom Lane)
Improve pg_dump's handling of inherited table columns (Tom Lane)
pg_dump mishandled
situations where a child column has a different default
expression than its parent column. If the default is
textually identical to the parent's default, but not
actually the same (for instance, because of schema search
path differences) it would not be recognized as
different, so that after dump and restore the child would
be allowed to inherit the parent's default. Child columns
that are NOT NULL where
their parent is not could also be restored subtly
incorrectly.
Fix pg_restore's direct-to-database mode for INSERT-style table data (Tom Lane)
Direct-to-database restores from archive files made
with --inserts or
--column-inserts options fail
when using pg_restore
from a release dated September or December 2011, as a
result of an oversight in a fix for another problem. The
archive file itself is not at fault, and text-mode output
is okay.
Teach pg_upgrade to handle renaming of plpython's shared library (Bruce Momjian)
Upgrading a pre-9.1 database that included plpython would fail because of this oversight.
Allow pg_upgrade to
process tables containing regclass columns (Bruce Momjian)
Since pg_upgrade now
takes care to preserve pg_class OIDs, there was no longer
any reason for this restriction.
Make libpq ignore
ENOTDIR errors when looking
for an SSL client certificate file (Magnus Hagander)
This allows SSL connections to be established, though
without a certificate, even when the user's home
directory is set to something like /dev/null.
Fix some more field alignment issues in ecpg's SQLDA area (Zoltan Boszormenyi)
Allow AT option in
ecpg DEALLOCATE statements (Michael
Meskes)
The infrastructure to support this has been there for awhile, but through an oversight there was still an error check rejecting the case.
Do not use the variable name when defining a varchar structure in ecpg (Michael Meskes)
Fix contrib/auto_explain's JSON output mode
to produce valid JSON (Andrew Dunstan)
The output used brackets at the top level, when it should have used braces.
Fix error in contrib/intarray's int[] & int[] operator (Guillaume
Lelarge)
If the smallest integer the two input arrays have in common is 1, and there are smaller values in either array, then 1 would be incorrectly omitted from the result.
Fix error detection in contrib/pgcrypto's encrypt_iv() and decrypt_iv() (Marko Kreen)
These functions failed to report certain types of invalid-input errors, and would instead return random garbage values for incorrect input.
Fix one-byte buffer overrun in contrib/test_parser (Paul Guyot)
The code would try to read one more byte than it
should, which would crash in corner cases. Since
contrib/test_parser is only
example code, this is not a security issue in itself, but
bad example code is still bad.
Use __sync_lock_test_and_set() for
spinlocks on ARM, if available (Martin Pitt)
This function replaces our previous use of the
SWPB instruction, which is
deprecated and not available on ARMv6 and later. Reports
suggest that the old code doesn't fail in an obvious way
on recent ARM boards, but simply doesn't interlock
concurrent accesses, leading to bizarre failures in
multiprocess operation.
Use -fexcess-precision=standard option when
building with gcc versions that accept it (Andrew
Dunstan)
This prevents assorted scenarios wherein recent versions of gcc will produce creative results.
Allow use of threaded Python on FreeBSD (Chris Rees)
Our configure script previously believed that this combination wouldn't work; but FreeBSD fixed the problem, so remove that error check.
Allow MinGW builds to use standardly-named OpenSSL libraries (Tomasz Ostrowski)
⇑ Upgrade to 9.1.4 released on 2012-06-04 - docs
Fix incorrect password transformation in contrib/pgcrypto's DES crypt() function (Solar Designer)
If a password string contained the byte value
0x80, the remainder of the
password was ignored, causing the password to be much
weaker than it appeared. With this fix, the rest of the
string is properly included in the DES hash. Any stored
password values that are affected by this bug will thus
no longer match, so the stored values may need to be
updated. (CVE-2012-2143)
Ignore SECURITY DEFINER
and SET attributes for a
procedural language's call handler (Tom Lane)
Applying such attributes to a call handler could crash the server. (CVE-2012-2655)
Make contrib/citext's
upgrade script fix collations of citext arrays and domains over citext (Tom Lane)
Release 9.1.2 provided a fix for collations of
citext columns and indexes in
databases upgraded or reloaded from pre-9.1
installations, but that fix was incomplete: it neglected
to handle arrays and domains over citext. This release extends the module's
upgrade script to handle these cases. As before, if you
have already run the upgrade script, you'll need to run
the collation update commands by hand instead. See the
9.1.2 release notes for more information about doing
this.
Allow numeric timezone offsets in timestamp input to be up to 16 hours away
from UTC (Tom Lane)
Some historical time zones have offsets larger than 15 hours, the previous limit. This could result in dumped data values being rejected during reload.
Fix timestamp conversion to cope when the given time is exactly the last DST transition time for the current timezone (Tom Lane)
This oversight has been there a long time, but was not noticed previously because most DST-using zones are presumed to have an indefinite sequence of future DST transitions.
Fix text to name and char to
name casts to perform string
truncation correctly in multibyte encodings (Karl
Schnaitter)
Fix memory copying bug in to_tsquery() (Heikki Linnakangas)
Ensure txid_current()
reports the correct epoch when executed in hot standby
(Simon Riggs)
Fix planner's handling of outer PlaceHolderVars within subqueries (Tom Lane)
This bug concerns sub-SELECTs that reference variables coming from the nullable side of an outer join of the surrounding query. In 9.1, queries affected by this bug would fail with “ERROR: Upper-level PlaceHolderVar found where not expected”. But in 9.0 and 8.4, you'd silently get possibly-wrong answers, since the value transmitted into the subquery wouldn't go to null when it should.
Fix planning of UNION ALL
subqueries with output columns that are not simple
variables (Tom Lane)
Planning of such cases got noticeably worse in 9.1 as a result of a misguided fix for “MergeAppend child's targetlist doesn't match MergeAppend” errors. Revert that fix and do it another way.
Fix slow session startup when pg_attribute is very large (Tom
Lane)
If pg_attribute
exceeds one-fourth of shared_buffers, cache rebuilding code
that is sometimes needed during session start would
trigger the synchronized-scan logic, causing it to take
many times longer than normal. The problem was
particularly acute if many new sessions were starting at
once.
Ensure sequential scans check for query cancel reasonably often (Merlin Moncure)
A scan encountering many consecutive pages that contain no live tuples would not respond to interrupts meanwhile.
Ensure the Windows implementation of PGSemaphoreLock() clears ImmediateInterruptOK before returning
(Tom Lane)
This oversight meant that a query-cancel interrupt received later in the same query could be accepted at an unsafe time, with unpredictable but not good consequences.
Show whole-row variables safely when printing views or rules (Abbas Butt, Tom Lane)
Corner cases involving ambiguous names (that is, the name could be either a table or column name of the query) were printed in an ambiguous way, risking that the view or rule would be interpreted differently after dump and reload. Avoid the ambiguous case by attaching a no-op cast.
Fix COPY FROM to properly
handle null marker strings that correspond to invalid
encoding (Tom Lane)
A null marker string such as E'\\0' should work, and did work in the
past, but the case got broken in 8.4.
Fix EXPLAIN VERBOSE for
writable CTEs containing RETURNING clauses (Tom Lane)
Fix PREPARE TRANSACTION
to work correctly in the presence of advisory locks (Tom
Lane)
Historically, PREPARE
TRANSACTION has simply ignored any session-level
advisory locks the session holds, but this case was
accidentally broken in 9.1.
Fix truncation of unlogged tables (Robert Haas)
Ignore missing schemas during non-interactive
assignments of search_path
(Tom Lane)
This re-aligns 9.1's behavior with that of older
branches. Previously 9.1 would throw an error for
nonexistent schemas mentioned in search_path settings obtained from
places such as ALTER DATABASE
SET.
Fix bugs with temporary or transient tables used in extension scripts (Tom Lane)
This includes cases such as a rewriting ALTER TABLE within an extension update
script, since that uses a transient table behind the
scenes.
Ensure autovacuum worker processes perform stack depth checking properly (Heikki Linnakangas)
Previously, infinite recursion in a function invoked
by auto-ANALYZE could crash
worker processes.
Fix logging collector to not lose log coherency under high load (Andrew Dunstan)
The collector previously could fail to reassemble large messages if it got too busy.
Fix logging collector to ensure it will restart file rotation after receiving SIGHUP (Tom Lane)
Fix “too many LWLocks taken” failure in GiST indexes (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix WAL replay logic for GIN indexes to not fail if the index was subsequently dropped (Tom Lane)
Correctly detect SSI conflicts of prepared transactions after a crash (Dan Ports)
Avoid synchronous replication delay when committing a transaction that only modified temporary tables (Heikki Linnakangas)
In such a case the transaction's commit record need not be flushed to standby servers, but some of the code didn't know that and waited for it to happen anyway.
Fix error handling in pg_basebackup (Thomas Ogrisegg, Fujii Masao)
Fix walsender to not go into a busy loop if connection is terminated (Fujii Masao)
Fix memory leak in PL/pgSQL's RETURN NEXT command (Joe Conway)
Fix PL/pgSQL's GET
DIAGNOSTICS command when the target is the
function's first variable (Tom Lane)
Ensure that PL/Perl package-qualifies the _TD variable (Alex Hunsaker)
This bug caused trigger invocations to fail when they are nested within a function invocation that changes the current package.
Fix PL/Python functions returning composite types to accept a string for their result value (Jan Urbanski)
This case was accidentally broken by the 9.1 additions to allow a composite result value to be supplied in other formats, such as dictionaries.
Fix potential access off the end of memory in
psql's expanded display
(\x) mode (Peter
Eisentraut)
Fix several performance problems in pg_dump when the database contains many objects (Jeff Janes, Tom Lane)
pg_dump could get very slow if the database contained many schemas, or if many objects are in dependency loops, or if there are many owned sequences.
Fix memory and file descriptor leaks in pg_restore when reading a directory-format archive (Peter Eisentraut)
Fix pg_upgrade for the case that a database stored in a non-default tablespace contains a table in the cluster's default tablespace (Bruce Momjian)
In ecpg, fix rare
memory leaks and possible overwrite of one byte after the
sqlca_t structure (Peter
Eisentraut)
Fix contrib/dblink's
dblink_exec() to not leak
temporary database connections upon error (Tom Lane)
Fix contrib/dblink to
report the correct connection name in error messages
(Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Fix contrib/vacuumlo to
use multiple transactions when dropping many large
objects (Tim Lewis, Robert Haas, Tom Lane)
This change avoids exceeding max_locks_per_transaction when many
objects need to be dropped. The behavior can be adjusted
with the new -l (limit)
option.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2012c for DST law changes in Antarctica, Armenia, Chile, Cuba, Falkland Islands, Gaza, Haiti, Hebron, Morocco, Syria, and Tokelau Islands; also historical corrections for Canada.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.1.5 released on 2012-08-17 - docs
Prevent access to external files/URLs via XML entity references (Noah Misch, Tom Lane)
xml_parse() would
attempt to fetch external files or URLs as needed to
resolve DTD and entity references in an XML value, thus
allowing unprivileged database users to attempt to fetch
data with the privileges of the database server. While
the external data wouldn't get returned directly to the
user, portions of it could be exposed in error messages
if the data didn't parse as valid XML; and in any case
the mere ability to check existence of a file might be
useful to an attacker. (CVE-2012-3489)
Prevent access to external files/URLs via contrib/xml2's xslt_process() (Peter Eisentraut)
libxslt offers the ability to read and write both files and URLs through stylesheet commands, thus allowing unprivileged database users to both read and write data with the privileges of the database server. Disable that through proper use of libxslt's security options. (CVE-2012-3488)
Also, remove xslt_process()'s ability to fetch
documents and stylesheets from external files/URLs. While
this was a documented “feature”, it was long regarded as a
bad idea. The fix for CVE-2012-3489 broke that
capability, and rather than expend effort on trying to
fix it, we're just going to summarily remove it.
Prevent too-early recycling of btree index pages (Noah Misch)
When we allowed read-only transactions to skip assigning XIDs, we introduced the possibility that a deleted btree page could be recycled while a read-only transaction was still in flight to it. This would result in incorrect index search results. The probability of such an error occurring in the field seems very low because of the timing requirements, but nonetheless it should be fixed.
Fix crash-safety bug with newly-created-or-reset sequences (Tom Lane)
If ALTER SEQUENCE was
executed on a freshly created or reset sequence, and then
precisely one nextval()
call was made on it, and then the server crashed, WAL
replay would restore the sequence to a state in which it
appeared that no nextval()
had been done, thus allowing the first sequence value to
be returned again by the next nextval() call. In particular this
could manifest for serial
columns, since creation of a serial column's sequence
includes an ALTER SEQUENCE OWNED
BY step.
Fix race condition in enum-type value comparisons (Robert
Haas, Tom Lane)
Comparisons could fail when encountering an enum value added since the current query started.
Fix txid_current() to
report the correct epoch when not in hot standby (Heikki
Linnakangas)
This fixes a regression introduced in the previous minor release.
Prevent selection of unsuitable replication connections as the synchronous standby (Fujii Masao)
The master might improperly choose pseudo-servers such as pg_receivexlog or pg_basebackup as the synchronous standby, and then wait indefinitely for them.
Fix bug in startup of Hot Standby when a master transaction has many subtransactions (Andres Freund)
This mistake led to failures reported as “out-of-order XID insertion in KnownAssignedXids”.
Ensure the backup_label
file is fsync'd after pg_start_backup() (Dave Kerr)
Fix timeout handling in walsender processes (Tom Lane)
WAL sender background processes neglected to establish a SIGALRM handler, meaning they would wait forever in some corner cases where a timeout ought to happen.
Wake walsenders after each background flush by walwriter (Andres Freund, Simon Riggs)
This greatly reduces replication delay when the workload contains only asynchronously-committed transactions.
Fix LISTEN/NOTIFY to cope better with I/O problems,
such as out of disk space (Tom Lane)
After a write failure, all subsequent attempts to send
more NOTIFY messages would
fail with messages like “Could not read from file "pg_notify/nnnn" at offset
nnnnn:
Success”.
Only allow autovacuum to be auto-canceled by a directly blocked process (Tom Lane)
The original coding could allow inconsistent behavior
in some cases; in particular, an autovacuum could get
canceled after less than deadlock_timeout grace period.
Improve logging of autovacuum cancels (Robert Haas)
Fix log collector so that log_truncate_on_rotation works during
the very first log rotation after server start (Tom
Lane)
Fix WITH attached to a
nested set operation (UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT) (Tom Lane)
Ensure that a whole-row reference to a subquery
doesn't include any extra GROUP
BY or ORDER BY
columns (Tom Lane)
Fix dependencies generated during ALTER TABLE ... ADD CONSTRAINT USING
INDEX (Tom Lane)
This command left behind a redundant pg_depend entry for the index, which
could confuse later operations, notably ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN TYPE on one
of the indexed columns.
Fix REASSIGN OWNED to
work on extensions (Alvaro Herrera)
Disallow copying whole-row references in CHECK constraints and index definitions
during CREATE TABLE (Tom
Lane)
This situation can arise in CREATE TABLE with LIKE or INHERITS. The copied whole-row variable
was incorrectly labeled with the row type of the original
table not the new one. Rejecting the case seems
reasonable for LIKE, since
the row types might well diverge later. For INHERITS we should ideally allow it,
with an implicit coercion to the parent table's row type;
but that will require more work than seems safe to
back-patch.
Fix memory leak in ARRAY(SELECT
...) subqueries (Heikki Linnakangas, Tom Lane)
Fix planner to pass correct collation to operator selectivity estimators (Tom Lane)
This was not previously required by any core selectivity estimation function, but third-party code might need it.
Fix extraction of common prefixes from regular expressions (Tom Lane)
The code could get confused by quantified
parenthesized subexpressions, such as ^(foo)?bar. This would lead to incorrect
index optimization of searches for such patterns.
Fix bugs with parsing signed hh:mm and hh:mm:ss fields in interval constants (Amit Kapila, Tom
Lane)
Fix pg_dump to better
handle views containing partial GROUP BY lists (Tom Lane)
A view that lists only a primary key column in
GROUP BY, but uses other
table columns as if they were grouped, gets marked as
depending on the primary key. Improper handling of such
primary key dependencies in pg_dump resulted in poorly-ordered
dumps, which at best would be inefficient to restore and
at worst could result in outright failure of a parallel
pg_restore run.
In PL/Perl, avoid setting UTF8 flag when in SQL_ASCII encoding (Alex Hunsaker, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Alvaro Herrera)
Use Postgres' encoding conversion functions, not Python's, when converting a Python Unicode string to the server encoding in PL/Python (Jan Urbanski)
This avoids some corner-case problems, notably that Python doesn't support all the encodings Postgres does. A notable functional change is that if the server encoding is SQL_ASCII, you will get the UTF-8 representation of the string; formerly, any non-ASCII characters in the string would result in an error.
Fix mapping of PostgreSQL encodings to Python encodings in PL/Python (Jan Urbanski)
Report errors properly in contrib/xml2's xslt_process() (Tom Lane)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2012e for DST law changes in Morocco and Tokelau
⇑ Upgrade to 9.2 released on 2012-09-10 - docs
Allow queries to retrieve data only from indexes, avoiding heap access (Robert Haas, Ibrar Ahmed, Heikki Linnakangas, Tom Lane)
This feature is often called index-only scans. Heap access can be skipped for heap pages containing only tuples that are visible to all sessions, as reported by the visibility map; so the benefit applies mainly to mostly-static data. The visibility map was made crash-safe as a necessary part of implementing this feature.
Add the SP-GiST (Space-Partitioned GiST) index access method (Teodor Sigaev, Oleg Bartunov, Tom Lane)
SP-GiST is comparable to GiST in flexibility, but supports unbalanced partitioned search structures rather than balanced trees. For suitable problems, SP-GiST can be faster than GiST in both index build time and search time.
Allow group commit to work effectively under heavy load (Peter Geoghegan, Simon Riggs, Heikki Linnakangas)
Previously, batching of commits became ineffective as the write workload increased, because of internal lock contention.
Allow uncontended locks to be managed using a new fast-path lock mechanism (Robert Haas)
Reduce overhead of creating virtual transaction ID locks (Robert Haas)
Reduce the overhead of serializable isolation level locks (Dan Ports)
Improve PowerPC and Itanium spinlock performance (Manabu Ori, Robert Haas, Tom Lane)
Reduce overhead for shared invalidation cache messages (Robert Haas)
Move the frequently accessed members of the
PGPROC shared memory
array to a separate array (Pavan Deolasee, Heikki
Linnakangas, Robert Haas)
Improve COPY
performance by adding tuples to the heap in batches
(Heikki Linnakangas)
Improve GiST index performance for geometric data types by producing better trees with less memory allocation overhead (Alexander Korotkov)
Improve GiST index build times (Alexander Korotkov, Heikki Linnakangas)
Allow hint bits to be set sooner for temporary and unlogged tables (Robert Haas)
Allow sorting to be performed by inlined, non-SQL-callable comparison functions (Peter Geoghegan, Robert Haas, Tom Lane)
Make the number of CLOG buffers scale based on
shared_buffers (Robert Haas, Simon Riggs,
Tom Lane)
Improve performance of buffer pool scans that occur when tables or databases are dropped (Jeff Janes, Simon Riggs)
Improve performance of checkpointer's fsync-request queue when many tables are being dropped or truncated (Tom Lane)
Pass the safe number of file descriptors to child processes on Windows (Heikki Linnakangas)
This allows Windows sessions to use more open file descriptors than before.
Create a dedicated background process to perform checkpoints (Simon Riggs)
Formerly the background writer did both dirty-page writing and checkpointing. Separating this into two processes allows each goal to be accomplished more predictably.
Improve asynchronous commit behavior by waking the walwriter sooner (Simon Riggs)
Previously, only
wal_writer_delay triggered WAL flushing to disk; now filling
a WAL buffer also
triggers WAL
writes.
Allow the bgwriter, walwriter, checkpointer, statistics collector, log collector, and archiver background processes to sleep more efficiently during periods of inactivity (Peter Geoghegan, Tom Lane)
This series of changes reduces the frequency of process wake-ups when there is nothing to do, dramatically reducing power consumption on idle servers.
Allow the planner to generate custom plans for specific parameter values even when using prepared statements (Tom Lane)
In the past, a prepared statement always had a single “generic” plan that was used for all parameter values, which was frequently much inferior to the plans used for non-prepared statements containing explicit constant values. Now, the planner attempts to generate custom plans for specific parameter values. A generic plan will only be used after custom plans have repeatedly proven to provide no benefit. This change should eliminate the performance penalties formerly seen from use of prepared statements (including non-dynamic statements in PL/pgSQL).
Improve the planner's ability to use nested loops with inner index scans (Tom Lane)
The new “parameterized path” mechanism allows inner index scans to use values from relations that are more than one join level up from the scan. This can greatly improve performance in situations where semantic restrictions (such as outer joins) limit the allowed join orderings.
Improve the planning API for foreign data wrappers (Etsuro Fujita, Shigeru Hanada, Tom Lane)
Wrappers can now provide multiple access “paths” for their tables, allowing more flexibility in join planning.
Recognize self-contradictory restriction clauses for non-table relations (Tom Lane)
This check is only performed when
constraint_exclusion is on.
Allow indexed_col op
ANY(ARRAY[...]) conditions to be used in plain
index scans and index-only scans (Tom Lane)
Formerly such conditions could only be used in bitmap index scans.
Support MIN/MAX index optimizations on
boolean columns (Marti
Raudsepp)
Account for set-returning functions in
SELECT target lists when
setting row count estimates (Tom Lane)
Fix planner to handle indexes with duplicated columns more reliably (Tom Lane)
Collect and use element-frequency statistics for arrays (Alexander Korotkov, Tom Lane)
This change improves selectivity estimation for
the array <@,
&&, and
@> operators (array
containment and overlaps).
Allow statistics to be collected for foreign tables (Etsuro Fujita)
Improve cost estimates for use of partial indexes (Tom Lane)
Improve the planner's ability to use statistics for columns referenced in subqueries (Tom Lane)
Improve statistical estimates for subqueries using
DISTINCT (Tom Lane)
Do not treat role names and samerole specified in pg_hba.conf as automatically
including superusers (Andrew Dunstan)
This makes it easier to use reject lines with group roles.
Adjust pg_hba.conf
processing to handle token parsing more consistently
(Brendan Jurd, Álvaro Herrera)
Disallow empty pg_hba.conf files (Tom Lane)
This was done to more quickly detect misconfiguration.
Make superuser privilege imply replication privilege (Noah Misch)
This avoids the need to explicitly assign such privileges.
Attempt to log the current query string during a backend crash (Marti Raudsepp)
Make logging of autovacuum I/O activity more verbose (Greg Smith, Noah Misch)
This logging is triggered by
log_autovacuum_min_duration.
Make WAL replay report failures sooner (Fujii Masao)
There were some cases where failures were only reported once the server went into master mode.
Add pg_xlog_location_diff() to
simplify WAL location comparisons (Euler Taveira de
Oliveira)
This is useful for computing replication lag.
Support configurable event log application names on Windows (MauMau, Magnus Hagander)
This allows different instances to use the event
log with different identifiers, by setting the
event_source server parameter, which is
similar to how
syslog_ident works.
Change “unexpected EOF” messages to
DEBUG1 level, except
when there is an open transaction (Magnus
Hagander)
This change reduces log chatter caused by applications that close database connections ungracefully.
Track temporary file sizes and file counts in the
pg_stat_database system view (Tomas
Vondra)
Add a deadlock counter to the pg_stat_database system view
(Magnus Hagander)
Add a server parameter
track_io_timing to track I/O timings (Ants
Aasma, Robert Haas)
Report checkpoint timing information in
pg_stat_bgwriter (Greg Smith, Peter
Geoghegan)
Silently ignore nonexistent schemas specified in
search_path (Tom Lane)
This makes it more convenient to use generic path settings, which might include some schemas that don't exist in all databases.
Allow superusers to set
deadlock_timeout per-session, not just
per-cluster (Noah Misch)
This allows deadlock_timeout to be reduced for
transactions that are likely to be involved in a
deadlock, thus detecting the failure more quickly.
Alternatively, increasing the value can be used to
reduce the chances of a session being chosen for
cancellation due to a deadlock.
Add a server parameter
temp_file_limit to constrain temporary
file space usage per session (Mark Kirkwood)
Allow a superuser to SET an extension's superuser-only
custom variable before loading the associated
extension (Tom Lane)
The system now remembers whether a SET was performed by a superuser, so
that proper privilege checking can be done when the
extension is loaded.
Add postmaster -C option to query configuration
parameters (Bruce Momjian)
This allows pg_ctl to better handle cases
where PGDATA or
-D points to a
configuration-only directory.
Replace an empty locale name with the implied
value in CREATE DATABASE
(Tom Lane)
This prevents cases where pg_database.datcollate or datctype could be interpreted
differently after a server restart.
Allow multiple errors in postgresql.conf to be reported,
rather than just the first one (Alexey Klyukin, Tom
Lane)
Allow a reload of postgresql.conf to be processed
by all sessions, even if there are some settings
that are invalid for particular sessions (Alexey
Klyukin)
Previously, such not-valid-within-session values would cause all setting changes to be ignored by that session.
Add an include_if_exists facility for
configuration files (Greg Smith)
This works the same as include, except that an error is
not thrown if the file is missing.
Identify the server time zone during
initdb, and set
postgresql.conf
entries
timezone and
log_timezone accordingly (Tom Lane)
This avoids expensive time zone probes during server start.
Fix pg_settings to report
postgresql.conf line
numbers on Windows (Tom Lane)
Allow streaming replication slaves to forward data to other slaves (cascading replication) (Fujii Masao)
Previously, only the master server could supply streaming replication log files to standby servers.
Add new
synchronous_commit mode remote_write (Fujii Masao, Simon
Riggs)
This mode waits for the standby server to write transaction data to its own operating system, but does not wait for the data to be flushed to the standby's disk.
Add a pg_receivexlog tool to archive WAL file changes as they are written, rather than waiting for completed WAL files (Magnus Hagander)
Allow pg_basebackup to make base backups from standby servers (Jun Ishizuka, Fujii Masao)
This feature lets the work of making new base backups be off-loaded from the primary server.
Allow streaming of WAL files while pg_basebackup is performing a backup (Magnus Hagander)
This allows passing of WAL files to the standby before they are discarded on the primary.
Cancel the running query if the client gets disconnected (Florian Pflug)
If the backend detects loss of client connection during a query, it will now cancel the query rather than attempting to finish it.
Retain column names at run time for row expressions (Andrew Dunstan, Tom Lane)
This change allows better results when a row value
is converted to hstore or
json type: the fields of the
resulting value will now have the expected names.
Improve column labels used for sub-SELECT results (Marti Raudsepp)
Previously, the generic label ?column? was used.
Improve heuristics for determining the types of unknown values (Tom Lane)
The longstanding rule that an unknown constant might have the same type as the value on the other side of the operator using it is now applied when considering polymorphic operators, not only for simple operator matches.
Warn about creating casts to or from domain types (Robert Haas)
Such casts have no effect.
When a row fails a CHECK or NOT
NULL constraint, show the row's contents as
error detail (Jan Kundrát)
This should make it easier to identify which row is problematic when an insert or update is processing many rows.
Provide more reliable operation during concurrent DDL (Robert Haas, Noah Misch)
This change adds locking that should eliminate “cache lookup failed” errors in many scenarios. Also, it is no longer possible to add relations to a schema that is being concurrently dropped, a scenario that formerly led to inconsistent system catalog contents.
Add CONCURRENTLY option
to DROP
INDEX (Simon Riggs)
This allows index removal without blocking other sessions.
Allow foreign data wrappers to have per-column options (Shigeru Hanada)
Improve pretty-printing of view definitions (Andrew Dunstan)
Allow CHECK constraints to be declared
NOT VALID (Álvaro
Herrera)
Adding a NOT VALID
constraint does not cause the table to be scanned to
verify that existing rows meet the constraint.
Subsequently, newly added or updated rows are
checked. Such constraints are ignored by the planner
when considering constraint_exclusion, since it is
not certain that all rows meet the constraint.
The new ALTER TABLE
VALIDATE command allows NOT VALID constraints to be checked
for existing rows, after which they are converted
into ordinary constraints.
Allow CHECK
constraints to be declared NO
INHERIT (Nikhil Sontakke, Alex Hunsaker,
Álvaro Herrera)
This makes them enforceable only on the parent table, not on child tables.
Add the ability to rename constraints (Peter Eisentraut)
Reduce need to rebuild tables and indexes for
certain ALTER
TABLE ... ALTER
COLUMN TYPE operations (Noah Misch)
Increasing the length limit for a varchar or varbit column, or removing the limit
altogether, no longer requires a table rewrite.
Similarly, increasing the allowable precision of a
numeric column, or changing
a column from constrained numeric to unconstrained numeric, no longer requires a table
rewrite. Table rewrites are also avoided in similar
cases involving the interval, timestamp, and timestamptz types.
Avoid having ALTER
TABLE revalidate foreign key constraints
in some cases where it is not necessary (Noah
Misch)
Add IF EXISTS options
to some ALTER commands
(Pavel Stehule)
For example, ALTER FOREIGN
TABLE IF EXISTS foo RENAME TO bar.
Add ALTER FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER ...
RENAME and ALTER
SERVER ... RENAME (Peter Eisentraut)
Add ALTER
DOMAIN ... RENAME (Peter Eisentraut)
You could already rename domains using
ALTER TYPE.
Throw an error for ALTER
DOMAIN ... DROP
CONSTRAINT on a nonexistent constraint (Peter
Eisentraut)
An IF EXISTS option
has been added to provide the previous behavior.
Allow CREATE TABLE (LIKE
...) from foreign tables, views, and composite
types (Peter Eisentraut)
For example, this allows a table to be created whose schema matches a view.
Fix CREATE TABLE (LIKE
...) to avoid index name conflicts when
copying index comments (Tom Lane)
Fix CREATE TABLE ...
AS EXECUTE to handle
WITH NO DATA and column
name specifications (Tom Lane)
Add a security_barrier option for
views (KaiGai Kohei, Robert Haas)
This option prevents optimizations that might
allow view-protected data to be exposed to users, for
example pushing a clause involving an insecure
function into the WHERE
clause of the view. Such views can be expected to
perform more poorly than ordinary views.
Add a new LEAKPROOF function attribute to
mark functions that can safely be pushed down into
security_barrier views
(KaiGai Kohei)
Add support for privileges on data types (Peter Eisentraut)
This adds support for the SQL-conforming USAGE privilege on types and
domains. The intent is to be able to restrict which
users can create dependencies on types, since such
dependencies limit the owner's ability to alter the
type.
Check for INSERT
privileges in SELECT
INTO / CREATE TABLE
AS (KaiGai Kohei)
Because the object is being created by
SELECT INTO or
CREATE TABLE AS, the
creator would ordinarily have insert permissions; but
there are corner cases where this is not true, such
as when ALTER DEFAULT
PRIVILEGES has removed such permissions.
Allow VACUUM to
more easily skip pages that cannot be locked (Simon
Riggs, Robert Haas)
This change should greatly reduce the incidence of
VACUUM getting
“stuck” waiting for other
sessions.
Make EXPLAIN
(BUFFERS) count blocks
dirtied and written (Robert Haas)
Make EXPLAIN ANALYZE
report the number of rows rejected by filter steps
(Marko Tiikkaja)
Allow EXPLAIN ANALYZE
to avoid timing overhead when time values are not
wanted (Tomas Vondra)
This is accomplished by setting the new TIMING option to FALSE.
Add support for range data types (Jeff Davis, Tom Lane, Alexander Korotkov)
A range data type stores a lower and upper bound belonging to its base data type. It supports operations like contains, overlaps, and intersection.
Add a JSON data type (Robert Haas)
This type stores JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data with proper validation.
Add
array_to_json() and row_to_json() (Andrew Dunstan)
Add a SMALLSERIAL data type (Mike
Pultz)
This is like SERIAL,
except it stores the sequence in a two-byte integer
column (int2).
Allow domains to be declared
NOT VALID (Álvaro
Herrera)
This option can be set at domain creation time, or
via ALTER DOMAIN ...
ADD CONSTRAINT ...
NOT VALID. ALTER DOMAIN ... VALIDATE CONSTRAINT fully validates
the constraint.
Support more locale-specific formatting options for
the money data type (Tom Lane)
Specifically, honor all the POSIX options for ordering of the value, sign, and currency symbol in monetary output. Also, make sure that the thousands separator is only inserted to the left of the decimal point, as required by POSIX.
Add bitwise “and”, “or”, and
“not” operators for the
macaddr data type (Brendan
Jurd)
Allow xpath() to return a
single-element XML
array when supplied a scalar value (Florian Pflug)
Previously, it returned an empty array. This change
will also cause xpath_exists() to return true, not
false, for such expressions.
Improve XML error handling to be more robust (Florian Pflug)
Allow non-superusers to use pg_cancel_backend() and pg_terminate_backend() on other
sessions belonging to the same user (Magnus Hagander,
Josh Kupershmidt, Dan Farina)
Previously only superusers were allowed to use these functions.
Allow importing and exporting of transaction snapshots (Joachim Wieland, Tom Lane)
This allows multiple transactions to share identical
views of the database state. Snapshots are exported via
pg_export_snapshot() and imported via
SET TRANSACTION
SNAPSHOT. Only snapshots from
currently-running transactions can be imported.
Support
COLLATION FOR on
expressions (Peter Eisentraut)
This returns a string representing the collation of the expression.
Add
pg_opfamily_is_visible() (Josh
Kupershmidt)
Add a numeric variant of
pg_size_pretty() for use with pg_xlog_location_diff() (Fujii
Masao)
Add a
pg_trigger_depth() function (Kevin
Grittner)
This reports the current trigger call depth.
Allow
string_agg() to
process bytea values (Pavel
Stehule)
Fix regular expressions in which a back-reference occurs within a larger quantified subexpression (Tom Lane)
For example, ^(\w+)(
\1)+$. Previous releases did not check that the
back-reference actually matched the first
occurrence.
Add information schema views role_udt_grants, udt_privileges, and user_defined_types (Peter
Eisentraut)
Add composite-type attributes to the information
schema element_types
view (Peter Eisentraut)
Implement interval_type columns in the
information schema (Peter Eisentraut)
Formerly these columns read as nulls.
Implement collation-related columns in the
information schema attributes, columns, domains, and element_types views (Peter
Eisentraut)
Implement the with_hierarchy column in the
information schema table_privileges view (Peter
Eisentraut)
Add display of sequence USAGE privileges to information schema
(Peter Eisentraut)
Make the information schema show default privileges (Peter Eisentraut)
Previously, non-empty default permissions were not represented in the views.
Allow the PL/pgSQL OPEN cursor command to supply
parameters by name (Yeb Havinga)
Add a GET STACKED
DIAGNOSTICS PL/pgSQL command to retrieve
exception info (Pavel Stehule)
Speed up PL/pgSQL array assignment by caching type information (Pavel Stehule)
Improve performance and memory consumption for
long chains of ELSIF
clauses (Tom Lane)
Output the function signature, not just the name, in PL/pgSQL error messages (Pavel Stehule)
Add PL/Python SPI cursor support (Jan Urbanski)
This allows PL/Python to read partial result sets.
Add result metadata functions to PL/Python (Peter Eisentraut)
Specifically, this adds result object functions
.colnames, .coltypes, and .coltypmods.
Remove support for Python 2.2 (Peter Eisentraut)
Allow SQL-language functions to reference parameters by name (Matthew Draper)
To use this, simply name the function arguments and then reference the argument names in the SQL function body.
Add initdb
options --auth-local and
--auth-host (Peter
Eisentraut)
This allows separate control of local and host pg_hba.conf authentication settings.
--auth still controls
both.
Add --replication/--no-replication flags to createuser to control
replication permission (Fujii Masao)
Add the --if-exists
option to dropdb
and dropuser (Josh
Kupershmidt)
Give command-line tools the ability to specify the
name of the database to connect to, and fall back to
template1 if a
postgres database
connection fails (Robert Haas)
Add a display mode to auto-expand output based on the display width (Peter Eisentraut)
This adds the auto
option to the \x
command, which switches to the expanded mode when the
normal output would be wider than the screen.
Allow inclusion of a script file that is named relative to the directory of the file from which it was invoked (Gurjeet Singh)
This is done with a new command \ir.
Add support for non-ASCII characters in psql variable names (Tom Lane)
Add support for major-version-specific
.psqlrc files (Bruce
Momjian)
psql already
supported minor-version-specific .psqlrc files.
Provide environment variable overrides for psql history and startup file locations (Andrew Dunstan)
PSQL_HISTORY and
PSQLRC now determine these
file names if set.
Add a \setenv command
to modify the environment variables passed to child
processes (Andrew Dunstan)
Name psql's
temporary editor files with a .sql extension (Peter
Eisentraut)
This allows extension-sensitive editors to select the right mode.
Allow psql to use zero-byte field and record separators (Peter Eisentraut)
Various shell tools use zero-byte (NUL) separators, e.g. find.
Make the \timing
option report times for failed queries (Magnus
Hagander)
Previously times were reported only for successful queries.
Unify and tighten psql's treatment of \copy and SQL COPY (Noah Misch)
This fix makes failure behavior more predictable
and honors \set
ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK.
Make \d on a sequence
show the table/column name owning it (Magnus
Hagander)
Show statistics target for columns in \d+ (Magnus Hagander)
Show role password expiration dates in
\du (Fabrízio de Royes
Mello)
Display comments for casts, conversions, domains, and languages (Josh Kupershmidt)
These are included in the output of \dC+, \dc+, \dD+, and \dL respectively.
Display comments for SQL/MED objects (Josh Kupershmidt)
These are included in the output of \des+, \det+, and \dew+ for foreign servers, foreign
tables, and foreign data wrappers respectively.
Change \dd to display
comments only for object types without their own
backslash command (Josh Kupershmidt)
In psql tab
completion, complete SQL keywords in either upper or
lower case according to the new COMP_KEYWORD_CASE setting (Peter
Eisentraut)
Add tab completion support for EXECUTE (Andreas Karlsson)
Allow tab completion of role references in
GRANT/REVOKE (Peter Eisentraut)
Allow tab completion of file names to supply quotes, when necessary (Noah Misch)
Change tab completion support for TABLE to also include views (Magnus
Hagander)
Add an --exclude-table-data option to
pg_dump (Andrew
Dunstan)
This allows dumping of a table's definition but not its data, on a per-table basis.
Add a --section option
to pg_dump and
pg_restore (Andrew
Dunstan)
Valid values are pre-data, data, and post-data. The option can be given
more than once to select two or more sections.
Make pg_dumpall dump all roles first, then all configuration settings on roles (Phil Sorber)
This allows a role's configuration settings to mention other roles without generating an error.
Allow pg_dumpall
to avoid errors if the postgres database is missing in the
new cluster (Robert Haas)
Dump foreign server user mappings in user name order (Peter Eisentraut)
This helps produce deterministic dump files.
Dump operators in a predictable order (Peter Eisentraut)
Tighten rules for when extension configuration tables are dumped by pg_dump (Tom Lane)
Make pg_dump emit more useful dependency information (Tom Lane)
The dependency links included in archive-format dumps were formerly of very limited use, because they frequently referenced objects that appeared nowhere in the dump. Now they represent actual dependencies (possibly indirect) among the dumped objects.
Improve pg_dump's performance when dumping many database objects (Tom Lane)
Allow libpq connection strings to have the format of a URI (Alexander Shulgin)
The syntax begins with postgres://. This can allow
applications to avoid implementing their own parser for
URIs representing database connections.
Add a connection option to disable SSL compression (Laurenz Albe)
This can be used to remove the overhead of SSL compression on fast networks.
Add a single-row processing mode for better handling of large result sets (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Marko Kreen)
Previously, libpq always collected the entire query result in memory before passing it back to the application.
Add const qualifiers to
the declarations of the functions PQconnectdbParams, PQconnectStartParams, and
PQpingParams (Lionel Elie
Mamane)
Allow the .pgpass file
to include escaped characters in the password field
(Robert Haas)
Make library functions use abort() instead of exit() when it is necessary to
terminate the process (Peter Eisentraut)
This choice does not interfere with the normal exit codes used by the program, and generates a signal that can be caught by the caller.
Remove dead ports (Peter Eisentraut)
The following platforms are no longer supported: dgux, nextstep, sunos4, svr4, ultrix4, univel, bsdi.
Add support for building with MS Visual Studio 2010 (Brar Piening)
Enable compiling with the MinGW-w64 32-bit compiler (Lars Kanis)
Install plpgsql.h into
include/server during
installation (Heikki Linnakangas)
Improve the latch facility to include detection of postmaster death (Peter Geoghegan, Heikki Linnakangas, Tom Lane)
This eliminates one of the main reasons that background processes formerly had to wake up to poll for events.
Use C flexible array members, where supported (Peter Eisentraut)
Improve the concurrent transaction regression tests (isolationtester) (Noah Misch)
Modify thread_test
to create its test files in the current directory,
rather than /tmp (Bruce
Momjian)
Improve flex and bison warning and error reporting (Tom Lane)
Add memory barrier support (Robert Haas)
This is currently unused.
Modify pgindent to use a typedef file (Bruce Momjian)
Add a hook for processing messages due to be sent to the server log (Martin Pihlak)
Add object access hooks for DROP commands (KaiGai Kohei)
Centralize DROP
handling for some object types (KaiGai Kohei)
Add a pg_upgrade test suite (Peter Eisentraut)
Sync regular expression code with TCL 8.5.11 and improve internal processing (Tom Lane)
Move CRC tables to libpgport, and provide them in a separate include file (Daniel Farina)
Add options to git_changelog for use in major release note creation (Bruce Momjian)
Support Linux's /proc/self/oom_score_adj API (Tom
Lane)
Improve efficiency of dblink by using libpq's new single-row processing mode (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Marko Kreen)
This improvement does not apply to dblink_send_query()/dblink_get_result().
Support force_not_null
option in file_fdw (Shigeru Hanada)
Implement dry-run mode for pg_archivecleanup (Gabriele Bartolini)
This only outputs the names of files to be deleted.
Add new pgbench switches --unlogged-tables, --tablespace, and --index-tablespace (Robert Haas)
Change pg_test_fsync to test for a fixed amount of time, rather than a fixed number of cycles (Bruce Momjian)
The -o/cycles option was
removed, and -s/seconds
added.
Add a pg_test_timing utility to measure clock monotonicity and timing overhead (Ants Aasma, Greg Smith)
Add a tcn (triggered change
notification) module to generate NOTIFY events on table changes (Kevin
Grittner)
Adjust pg_upgrade environment variables (Bruce Momjian)
Rename data, bin, and port environment variables
to begin with PG, and
support PGPORTOLD/PGPORTNEW, to replace PGPORT.
Overhaul pg_upgrade logging and failure reporting (Bruce Momjian)
Create four append-only log files, and delete them
on success. Add -r/--retain option to unconditionally
retain these files. Also remove pg_upgrade options -g/-G/-l
options as unnecessary, and tighten log file
permissions.
Make pg_upgrade create a script to incrementally generate more accurate optimizer statistics (Bruce Momjian)
This reduces the time needed to generate minimal cluster statistics after an upgrade.
Allow pg_upgrade
to upgrade an old cluster that does not have a
postgres database (Bruce
Momjian)
Allow pg_upgrade to handle cases where some old or new databases are missing, as long as they are empty (Bruce Momjian)
Allow pg_upgrade to handle configuration-only directory installations (Bruce Momjian)
In pg_upgrade,
add -o/-O options to pass parameters to the
servers (Bruce Momjian)
This is useful for configuration-only directory installs.
Change pg_upgrade to use port 50432 by default (Bruce Momjian)
This helps avoid unintended client connections during the upgrade.
Reduce cluster locking in pg_upgrade (Bruce Momjian)
Specifically, only lock the old cluster if link mode is used, and do it right after the schema is restored.
Allow pg_stat_statements to aggregate similar queries via SQL text normalization (Peter Geoghegan, Tom Lane)
Users with applications that use non-parameterized SQL will now be able to monitor query performance without detailed log analysis.
Add dirtied and written block counts and read/write times to pg_stat_statements (Robert Haas, Ants Aasma)
Prevent pg_stat_statements from
double-counting PREPARE
and EXECUTE commands
(Tom Lane)
Support SECURITY
LABEL on global objects (KaiGai Kohei, Robert
Haas)
Specifically, add security labels to databases, tablespaces, and roles.
Allow sepgsql to honor database labels (KaiGai Kohei)
Perform sepgsql permission checks during the creation of various objects (KaiGai Kohei)
Add sepgsql_setcon()
and related functions to control the sepgsql security
domain (KaiGai Kohei)
Add a user space access cache to sepgsql to improve performance (KaiGai Kohei)
Add a rule to optionally build HTML documentation using the stylesheet from the website (Magnus Hagander)
Use gmake STYLE=website
draft.
Improve EXPLAIN
documentation (Tom Lane)
Document that user/database names are preserved with double-quoting by command-line tools like vacuumdb (Bruce Momjian)
Document the actual string returned by the client for MD5 authentication (Cyan Ogilvie)
Deprecate use of GLOBAL
and LOCAL in CREATE TEMP TABLE (Noah Misch)
PostgreSQL has long treated these keyword as no-ops, and continues to do so; but in future they might mean what the SQL standard says they mean, so applications should avoid using them.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.2.1 released on 2012-09-24 - docs
Fix persistence marking of shared buffers during WAL replay (Jeff Davis)
This mistake can result in buffers not being written out during checkpoints, resulting in data corruption if the server later crashes without ever having written those buffers. Corruption can occur on any server following crash recovery, but it is significantly more likely to occur on standby slave servers since those perform much more WAL replay. There is a low probability of corruption of btree and GIN indexes. There is a much higher probability of corruption of table “visibility maps”, which might lead to wrong answers from index-only scans. Table data proper cannot be corrupted by this bug.
While no index corruption due to this bug is known to
have occurred in the field, as a precautionary measure it
is recommended that production installations REINDEX all btree and GIN indexes at a
convenient time after upgrading to 9.2.1.
Also, it is recommended to perform a VACUUM of all tables while having
vacuum_freeze_table_age set to zero. This will
fix any incorrect visibility map data.
vacuum_cost_delay can be adjusted to reduce
the performance impact of vacuuming, while causing it to
take longer to finish.
Fix possible incorrect sorting of output from queries
involving WHERE
(Tom Lane)indexed_column IN
(list_of_values)
Fix planner failure for queries involving GROUP BY expressions along with window
functions and aggregates (Tom Lane)
Fix planner's assignment of executor parameters (Tom Lane)
This error could result in wrong answers from queries
that scan the same WITH
subquery multiple times.
Improve planner's handling of join conditions in index scans (Tom Lane)
Improve selectivity estimation for text search queries
involving prefixes, i.e. word:* patterns (Tom Lane)
Fix delayed recognition of permissions changes (Tom Lane)
A command that needed no locks other than ones its
transaction already had might fail to notice a concurrent
GRANT or REVOKE that committed since the start of
its transaction.
Fix ANALYZE to not fail
when a column is a domain over an array type (Tom
Lane)
Prevent PL/Perl from crashing if a recursive PL/Perl function is redefined while being executed (Tom Lane)
Work around possible misoptimization in PL/Perl (Tom Lane)
Some Linux distributions contain an incorrect version
of pthread.h that results
in incorrect compiled code in PL/Perl, leading to crashes
if a PL/Perl function calls another one that throws an
error.
Remove unnecessary dependency on pg_config from pg_upgrade (Peter Eisentraut)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2012f for DST law changes in Fiji
⇑ Upgrade to 9.2.2 released on 2012-12-06 - docs
Fix multiple bugs associated with CREATE/DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY (Andres
Freund, Tom Lane, Simon Riggs, Pavan Deolasee)
An error introduced while adding DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY allowed
incorrect indexing decisions to be made during the
initial phase of CREATE INDEX
CONCURRENTLY; so that indexes built by that
command could be corrupt. It is recommended that indexes
built in 9.2.X with CREATE INDEX
CONCURRENTLY be rebuilt after applying this
update.
In addition, fix CREATE/DROP
INDEX CONCURRENTLY to use in-place updates when
changing the state of an index's pg_index row. This prevents race
conditions that could cause concurrent sessions to miss
updating the target index, thus again resulting in
corrupt concurrently-created indexes.
Also, fix various other operations to ensure that they
ignore invalid indexes resulting from a failed
CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY
command. The most important of these is VACUUM, because an auto-vacuum could
easily be launched on the table before corrective action
can be taken to fix or remove the invalid index.
Also fix DROP INDEX
CONCURRENTLY to not disable insertions into the
target index until all queries using it are done.
Also fix misbehavior if DROP
INDEX CONCURRENTLY is canceled: the previous
coding could leave an un-droppable index behind.
Correct predicate locking for DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY (Kevin
Grittner)
Previously, SSI predicate locks were processed at the
wrong time, possibly leading to incorrect behavior of
serializable transactions executing in parallel with the
DROP.
Fix buffer locking during WAL replay (Tom Lane)
The WAL replay code was insufficiently careful about locking buffers when replaying WAL records that affect more than one page. This could result in hot standby queries transiently seeing inconsistent states, resulting in wrong answers or unexpected failures.
Fix an error in WAL generation logic for GIN indexes (Tom Lane)
This could result in index corruption, if a torn-page failure occurred.
Fix an error in WAL replay logic for SP-GiST indexes (Tom Lane)
This could result in index corruption after a crash, or on a standby server.
Fix incorrect detection of end-of-base-backup location during WAL recovery (Heikki Linnakangas)
This mistake allowed hot standby mode to start up before the database reaches a consistent state.
Properly remove startup process's virtual XID lock when promoting a hot standby server to normal running (Simon Riggs)
This oversight could prevent subsequent execution of
certain operations such as CREATE
INDEX CONCURRENTLY.
Avoid bogus “out-of-sequence timeline ID” errors in standby mode (Heikki Linnakangas)
Prevent the postmaster from launching new child processes after it's received a shutdown signal (Tom Lane)
This mistake could result in shutdown taking longer than it should, or even never completing at all without additional user action.
Fix the syslogger process to not fail when
log_rotation_age exceeds
2^31 milliseconds (about 25 days) (Tom Lane)
Fix WaitLatch() to
return promptly when the requested timeout expires (Jeff
Janes, Tom Lane)
With the previous coding, a steady stream of
non-wait-terminating interrupts could delay return from
WaitLatch() indefinitely.
This has been shown to be a problem for the autovacuum
launcher process, and might cause trouble elsewhere as
well.
Avoid corruption of internal hash tables when out of memory (Hitoshi Harada)
Prevent file descriptors for dropped tables from being held open past transaction end (Tom Lane)
This should reduce problems with long-since-dropped tables continuing to occupy disk space.
Prevent database-wide crash and restart when a new child process is unable to create a pipe for its latch (Tom Lane)
Although the new process must fail, there is no good reason to force a database-wide restart, so avoid that. This improves robustness when the kernel is nearly out of file descriptors.
Avoid planner crash with joins to unflattened subqueries (Tom Lane)
Fix planning of non-strict equivalence clauses above outer joins (Tom Lane)
The planner could derive incorrect constraints from a
clause equating a non-strict construct to something else,
for example WHERE COALESCE(foo, 0)
= 0 when foo is
coming from the nullable side of an outer join. 9.2
showed this type of error in more cases than previous
releases, but the basic bug has been there for a long
time.
Fix SELECT DISTINCT with
index-optimized MIN/MAX
on an inheritance tree (Tom Lane)
The planner would fail with “failed to re-find MinMaxAggInfo record” given this combination of factors.
Make sure the planner sees implicit and explicit casts as equivalent for all purposes, except in the minority of cases where there's actually a semantic difference (Tom Lane)
Include join clauses when considering whether partial indexes can be used for a query (Tom Lane)
A strict join clause can be sufficient to establish an
x IS NOT NULL predicate, for example. This
fixes a planner regression in 9.2, since previous
versions could make comparable deductions.
Limit growth of planning time when there are many indexable join clauses for the same index (Tom Lane)
Improve planner's ability to prove exclusion constraints from equivalence classes (Tom Lane)
Fix partial-row matching in hashed subplans to handle cross-type cases correctly (Tom Lane)
This affects multicolumn NOT
IN subplans, such as WHERE
(a, b) NOT IN (SELECT x, y FROM ...) when for
instance b and y are int4 and
int8 respectively. This mistake
led to wrong answers or crashes depending on the specific
datatypes involved.
Fix btree mark/restore functions to handle array keys (Tom Lane)
This oversight could result in wrong answers from
merge joins whose inner side is an index scan using an
indexed_column =
ANY(array)
Revert patch for taking fewer snapshots (Tom Lane)
The 9.2 change to reduce the number of snapshots taken during query execution led to some anomalous behaviors not seen in previous releases, because execution would proceed with a snapshot acquired before locking the tables used by the query. Thus, for example, a query would not be guaranteed to see updates committed by a preceding transaction even if that transaction had exclusive lock. We'll probably revisit this in future releases, but meanwhile put it back the way it was before 9.2.
Acquire buffer lock when re-fetching the old tuple for
an AFTER ROW UPDATE/DELETE
trigger (Andres Freund)
In very unusual circumstances, this oversight could
result in passing incorrect data to a trigger
WHEN condition, or to the
precheck logic for a foreign-key enforcement trigger.
That could result in a crash, or in an incorrect decision
about whether to fire the trigger.
Fix ALTER COLUMN TYPE to
handle inherited check constraints properly (Pavan
Deolasee)
This worked correctly in pre-8.4 releases, and now works correctly in 8.4 and later.
Fix ALTER EXTENSION SET
SCHEMA's failure to move some subsidiary objects
into the new schema (Álvaro Herrera, Dimitri
Fontaine)
Handle CREATE TABLE AS
EXECUTE correctly in extended query protocol (Tom
Lane)
Don't modify the input parse tree in DROP RULE IF NOT EXISTS and DROP TRIGGER IF NOT EXISTS (Tom
Lane)
This mistake would cause errors if a cached statement of one of these types was re-executed.
Fix REASSIGN OWNED to
handle grants on tablespaces (Álvaro Herrera)
Ignore incorrect pg_attribute entries for system
columns for views (Tom Lane)
Views do not have any system columns. However, we forgot to remove such entries when converting a table to a view. That's fixed properly for 9.3 and later, but in previous branches we need to defend against existing mis-converted views.
Fix rule printing to dump INSERT
INTO correctly (Tom Lane)table
DEFAULT VALUES
Guard against stack overflow when there are too many
UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT clauses in a query (Tom Lane)
Prevent platform-dependent failures when dividing the minimum possible integer value by -1 (Xi Wang, Tom Lane)
Fix possible access past end of string in date parsing (Hitoshi Harada)
Fix failure to advance XID epoch if XID wraparound
happens during a checkpoint and wal_level is hot_standby (Tom Lane, Andres
Freund)
While this mistake had no particular impact on
PostgreSQL itself, it
was bad for applications that rely on txid_current() and related functions:
the TXID value would appear to go backwards.
Fix pg_terminate_backend() and pg_cancel_backend() to not throw error
for a non-existent target process (Josh Kupershmidt)
This case already worked as intended when called by a superuser, but not so much when called by ordinary users.
Fix display of pg_stat_replication.sync_state at a page boundary
(Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Produce an understandable error message if the length of the path name for a Unix-domain socket exceeds the platform-specific limit (Tom Lane, Andrew Dunstan)
Formerly, this would result in something quite unhelpful, such as “Non-recoverable failure in name resolution”.
Fix memory leaks when sending composite column values to the client (Tom Lane)
Save some cycles by not searching for subtransaction locks at commit (Simon Riggs)
In a transaction holding many exclusive locks, this useless activity could be quite costly.
Make pg_ctl more
robust about reading the postmaster.pid file (Heikki
Linnakangas)
This fixes race conditions and possible file descriptor leakage.
Fix possible crash in psql if incorrectly-encoded data is
presented and the client_encoding setting is a client-only
encoding, such as SJIS (Jiang Guiqing)
Make pg_dump dump
SEQUENCE SET items in the
data not pre-data section of the archive (Tom Lane)
This fixes an undesirable inconsistency between the
meanings of --data-only and
--section=data, and also
fixes dumping of sequences that are marked as extension
configuration tables.
Fix pg_dump's
handling of DROP DATABASE
commands in --clean mode
(Guillaume Lelarge)
Beginning in 9.2.0, pg_dump
--clean would issue a DROP
DATABASE command, which was either useless or
dangerous depending on the usage scenario. It no longer
does that. This change also fixes the combination of
--clean and --create to work sensibly, i.e., emit
DROP DATABASE then
CREATE DATABASE before
reconnecting to the target database.
Fix pg_dump for views with circular dependencies and no relation options (Tom Lane)
The previous fix to dump relation options when a view
is involved in a circular dependency didn't work right
for the case that the view has no options; it emitted
ALTER VIEW foo SET () which
is invalid syntax.
Fix bugs in the restore.sql script emitted by
pg_dump in tar output format (Tom Lane)
The script would fail outright on tables whose names
include upper-case characters. Also, make the script
capable of restoring data in --inserts mode as well as the regular
COPY mode.
Fix pg_restore to
accept POSIX-conformant tar
files (Brian Weaver, Tom Lane)
The original coding of pg_dump's tar output mode produced files that are
not fully conformant with the POSIX standard. This has
been corrected for version 9.3. This patch updates
previous branches so that they will accept both the
incorrect and the corrected formats, in hopes of avoiding
compatibility problems when 9.3 comes out.
Fix tar files emitted by
pg_basebackup to be
POSIX conformant (Brian Weaver, Tom Lane)
Fix pg_resetxlog to
locate postmaster.pid
correctly when given a relative path to the data
directory (Tom Lane)
This mistake could lead to pg_resetxlog not noticing that there is an active postmaster using the data directory.
Fix libpq's
lo_import() and
lo_export() functions to
report file I/O errors properly (Tom Lane)
Fix ecpg's processing of nested structure pointer variables (Muhammad Usama)
Fix ecpg's
ecpg_get_data function to
handle arrays properly (Michael Meskes)
Prevent pg_upgrade from trying to process TOAST tables for system catalogs (Bruce Momjian)
This fixes an error seen when the information_schema has been dropped and
recreated. Other failures were also possible.
Improve pg_upgrade
performance by setting synchronous_commit to off in the new cluster (Bruce
Momjian)
Make contrib/pageinspect's btree page
inspection functions take buffer locks while examining
pages (Tom Lane)
Work around unportable behavior of malloc(0) and realloc(NULL, 0) (Tom Lane)
On platforms where these calls return NULL, some code mistakenly thought that
meant out-of-memory. This is known to have broken
pg_dump for databases
containing no user-defined aggregates. There might be
other cases as well.
Ensure that make install
for an extension creates the extension installation directory
(Cédric Villemain)
Previously, this step was missed if MODULEDIR was set in the extension's
Makefile.
Fix pgxs support for building loadable modules on AIX (Tom Lane)
Building modules outside the original source tree didn't work on AIX.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2012j for DST law changes in Cuba, Israel, Jordan, Libya, Palestine, Western Samoa, and portions of Brazil.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.2.3 released on 2013-02-07 - docs
Prevent execution of enum_recv from SQL (Tom Lane)
The function was misdeclared, allowing a simple SQL command to crash the server. In principle an attacker might be able to use it to examine the contents of server memory. Our thanks to Sumit Soni (via Secunia SVCRP) for reporting this issue. (CVE-2013-0255)
Fix multiple problems in detection of when a consistent database state has been reached during WAL replay (Fujii Masao, Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, Andres Freund)
Fix detection of end-of-backup point when no actual redo work is required (Heikki Linnakangas)
This mistake could result in incorrect “WAL ends before end of online backup” errors.
Update minimum recovery point when truncating a relation file (Heikki Linnakangas)
Once data has been discarded, it's no longer safe to stop recovery at an earlier point in the timeline.
Fix recycling of WAL segments after changing recovery target timeline (Heikki Linnakangas)
Properly restore timeline history files from archive on cascading standby servers (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix lock conflict detection on hot-standby servers (Andres Freund, Robert Haas)
Fix missing cancellations in hot standby mode (Noah Misch, Simon Riggs)
The need to cancel conflicting hot-standby queries would sometimes be missed, allowing those queries to see inconsistent data.
Prevent recovery pause feature from pausing before users can connect (Tom Lane)
Fix SQL grammar to allow subscripting or field selection from a sub-SELECT result (Tom Lane)
Fix performance problems with autovacuum truncation in busy workloads (Jan Wieck)
Truncation of empty pages at the end of a table requires exclusive lock, but autovacuum was coded to fail (and release the table lock) when there are conflicting lock requests. Under load, it is easily possible that truncation would never occur, resulting in table bloat. Fix by performing a partial truncation, releasing the lock, then attempting to re-acquire the lock and continue. This fix also greatly reduces the average time before autovacuum releases the lock after a conflicting request arrives.
Improve performance of SPI_execute and related functions,
thereby improving PL/pgSQL's EXECUTE (Heikki Linnakangas, Tom
Lane)
Remove some data-copying overhead that was added in 9.2 as a consequence of revisions in the plan caching mechanism. This eliminates a performance regression compared to 9.1, and also saves memory, especially when the query string to be executed contains many SQL statements.
A side benefit is that multi-statement query strings are now processed fully serially, that is we complete execution of earlier statements before running parse analysis and planning on the following ones. This eliminates a long-standing issue, in that DDL that should affect the behavior of a later statement will now behave as expected.
Restore pre-9.2 cost estimates for index usage (Tom Lane)
An ill-considered change of a fudge factor led to undesirably high cost estimates for use of very large indexes.
Fix intermittent crash in DROP
INDEX CONCURRENTLY (Tom Lane)
Fix potential corruption of shared-memory lock table
during CREATE/DROP INDEX
CONCURRENTLY (Tom Lane)
Fix COPY's
multiple-tuple-insertion code for the case of a tuple
larger than page size minus fillfactor (Heikki
Linnakangas)
The previous coding could get into an infinite loop.
Protect against race conditions when scanning
pg_tablespace (Stephen
Frost, Tom Lane)
CREATE DATABASE and
DROP DATABASE could
misbehave if there were concurrent updates of
pg_tablespace
entries.
Prevent DROP OWNED from
trying to drop whole databases or tablespaces (Álvaro
Herrera)
For safety, ownership of these objects must be reassigned, not dropped.
Fix error in
vacuum_freeze_table_age implementation (Andres
Freund)
In installations that have existed for more than
vacuum_freeze_min_age transactions, this
mistake prevented autovacuum from using partial-table
scans, so that a full-table scan would always happen
instead.
Prevent misbehavior when a RowExpr or XmlExpr is parse-analyzed twice (Andres
Freund, Tom Lane)
This mistake could be user-visible in contexts such as
CREATE TABLE LIKE INCLUDING
INDEXES.
Improve defenses against integer overflow in hashtable sizing calculations (Jeff Davis)
Fix some bugs associated with privileges on datatypes (Tom Lane)
There were some issues with default privileges for types, and pg_dump failed to dump such privileges at all.
Fix failure to ignore leftover temporary tables after a server crash (Tom Lane)
Fix failure to rotate postmaster log files for size reasons on Windows (Jeff Janes, Heikki Linnakangas)
Reject out-of-range dates in to_date() (Hitoshi Harada)
Fix pg_extension_config_dump() to handle
extension-update cases properly (Tom Lane)
This function will now replace any existing entry for the target table, making it usable in extension update scripts.
Fix PL/pgSQL's reporting of plan-time errors in possibly-simple expressions (Tom Lane)
The previous coding resulted in sometimes omitting the
first line in the CONTEXT
traceback for the error.
Fix PL/Python's handling of functions used as triggers on multiple tables (Andres Freund)
Ensure that non-ASCII prompt strings are translated to the correct code page on Windows (Alexander Law, Noah Misch)
This bug affected psql and some other client programs.
Fix possible crash in psql's \? command when not connected to a
database (Meng Qingzhong)
Fix possible error if a relation file is removed while pg_basebackup is running (Heikki Linnakangas)
Tolerate timeline switches while pg_basebackup -X fetch is backing up a
standby server (Heikki Linnakangas)
Make pg_dump exclude data of unlogged tables when running on a hot-standby server (Magnus Hagander)
This would fail anyway because the data is not
available on the standby server, so it seems most
convenient to assume --no-unlogged-table-data
automatically.
Fix pg_upgrade to deal with invalid indexes safely (Bruce Momjian)
Fix pg_upgrade's -O/-o options (Marti Raudsepp)
Fix one-byte buffer overrun in libpq's PQprintTuples (Xi Wang)
This ancient function is not used anywhere by PostgreSQL itself, but it might still be used by some client code.
Make ecpglib use translated messages properly (Chen Huajun)
Properly install ecpg_compat and pgtypes libraries on MSVC (Jiang Guiqing)
Include our version of isinf() in libecpg if it's not provided by the
system (Jiang Guiqing)
Rearrange configure's tests for supplied functions so it is not fooled by bogus exports from libedit/libreadline (Christoph Berg)
Ensure Windows build number increases over time (Magnus Hagander)
Make pgxs build
executables with the right .exe suffix when cross-compiling for
Windows (Zoltan Boszormenyi)
Add new timezone abbreviation FET (Tom Lane)
This is now used in some eastern-European time zones.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.2.4 released on 2013-04-04 - docs
Fix insecure parsing of server command-line switches (Mitsumasa Kondo, Kyotaro Horiguchi)
A connection request containing a database name that
begins with “-”
could be crafted to damage or destroy files within the
server's data directory, even if the request is
eventually rejected. (CVE-2013-1899)
Reset OpenSSL randomness state in each postmaster child process (Marko Kreen)
This avoids a scenario wherein random numbers
generated by contrib/pgcrypto functions might be
relatively easy for another database user to guess. The
risk is only significant when the postmaster is
configured with ssl =
on but most connections
don't use SSL encryption. (CVE-2013-1900)
Make REPLICATION privilege checks test current user not authenticated user (Noah Misch)
An unprivileged database user could exploit this
mistake to call pg_start_backup() or pg_stop_backup(), thus possibly
interfering with creation of routine backups.
(CVE-2013-1901)
Fix GiST indexes to not use “fuzzy” geometric comparisons when it's not appropriate to do so (Alexander Korotkov)
The core geometric types perform comparisons using
“fuzzy” equality, but gist_box_same must do exact
comparisons, else GiST indexes using it might become
inconsistent. After installing this update, users should
REINDEX any GiST indexes on
box, polygon, circle,
or point columns, since all of
these use gist_box_same.
Fix erroneous range-union and penalty logic in GiST
indexes that use contrib/btree_gist for variable-width
data types, that is text,
bytea, bit, and numeric
columns (Tom Lane)
These errors could result in inconsistent indexes in
which some keys that are present would not be found by
searches, and also in useless index bloat. Users are
advised to REINDEX such
indexes after installing this update.
Fix bugs in GiST page splitting code for multi-column indexes (Tom Lane)
These errors could result in inconsistent indexes in
which some keys that are present would not be found by
searches, and also in indexes that are unnecessarily
inefficient to search. Users are advised to REINDEX multi-column GiST indexes after
installing this update.
Fix gist_point_consistent to handle
fuzziness consistently (Alexander Korotkov)
Index scans on GiST indexes on point columns would sometimes yield results
different from a sequential scan, because gist_point_consistent disagreed with
the underlying operator code about whether to do
comparisons exactly or fuzzily.
Fix buffer leak in WAL replay (Heikki Linnakangas)
This bug could result in “incorrect local pin count” errors during replay, making recovery impossible.
Ensure we do crash recovery before entering archive
recovery, if the database was not stopped cleanly and a
recovery.conf file is
present (Heikki Linnakangas, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Mitsumasa
Kondo)
This is needed to ensure that the database is consistent in certain scenarios, such as initializing a standby server with a filesystem snapshot from a running server.
Avoid deleting not-yet-archived WAL files during crash recovery (Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao)
Fix race condition in DELETE
RETURNING (Tom Lane)
Under the right circumstances, DELETE RETURNING could attempt to fetch
data from a shared buffer that the current process no
longer has any pin on. If some other process changed the
buffer meanwhile, this would lead to garbage RETURNING output, or even a crash.
Fix infinite-loop risk in regular expression compilation (Tom Lane, Don Porter)
Fix potential null-pointer dereference in regular expression compilation (Tom Lane)
Fix to_char() to use
ASCII-only case-folding rules where appropriate (Tom
Lane)
This fixes misbehavior of some template patterns that
should be locale-independent, but mishandled “I” and “i” in Turkish locales.
Fix unwanted rejection of timestamp 1999-12-31 24:00:00 (Tom Lane)
Fix SQL-language functions to be safely usable as support functions for range types (Tom Lane)
Fix logic error when a single transaction does
UNLISTEN then LISTEN (Tom Lane)
The session wound up not listening for notify events at all, though it surely should listen in this case.
Fix possible planner crash after columns have been added to a view that's depended on by another view (Tom Lane)
Fix performance issue in EXPLAIN
(ANALYZE, TIMING OFF) (Pavel Stehule)
Remove useless “picksplit doesn't support secondary split” log messages (Josh Hansen, Tom Lane)
This message seems to have been added in expectation of code that was never written, and probably never will be, since GiST's default handling of secondary splits is actually pretty good. So stop nagging end users about it.
Remove vestigial secondary-split support in
gist_box_picksplit() (Tom
Lane)
Not only was this implementation of secondary-split not better than the default implementation, it's actually worse. So remove it and let the default code path handle the case.
Fix possible failure to send a session's last few transaction commit/abort counts to the statistics collector (Tom Lane)
Eliminate memory leaks in PL/Perl's spi_prepare() function (Alex Hunsaker,
Tom Lane)
Fix pg_dumpall to
handle database names containing “=” correctly (Heikki
Linnakangas)
Avoid crash in pg_dump when an incorrect connection string is given (Heikki Linnakangas)
Ignore invalid indexes in pg_dump and pg_upgrade (Michael Paquier, Bruce Momjian)
Dumping invalid indexes can cause problems at restore time, for example if the reason the index creation failed was because it tried to enforce a uniqueness condition not satisfied by the table's data. Also, if the index creation is in fact still in progress, it seems reasonable to consider it to be an uncommitted DDL change, which pg_dump wouldn't be expected to dump anyway. pg_upgrade now also skips invalid indexes rather than failing.
In pg_basebackup, include only the current server version's subdirectory when backing up a tablespace (Heikki Linnakangas)
Add a server version check in pg_basebackup and pg_receivexlog, so they fail cleanly with version combinations that won't work (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix contrib/dblink to
handle inconsistent settings of DateStyle or IntervalStyle safely (Daniel Farina, Tom
Lane)
Previously, if the remote server had different
settings of these parameters, ambiguous dates might be
read incorrectly. This fix ensures that datetime and
interval columns fetched by a dblink query will be interpreted
correctly. Note however that inconsistent settings are
still risky, since literal values appearing in SQL
commands sent to the remote server might be interpreted
differently than they would be locally.
Fix contrib/pg_trgm's
similarity() function to
return zero for trigram-less strings (Tom Lane)
Previously it returned NaN due to internal division by
zero.
Enable building PostgreSQL with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 (Brar Piening, Noah Misch)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2013b for DST law changes in Chile, Haiti, Morocco, Paraguay, and some Russian areas. Also, historical zone data corrections for numerous places.
Also, update the time zone abbreviation files for
recent changes in Russia and elsewhere: CHOT, GET,
IRKT, KGT, KRAT,
MAGT, MAWT, MSK,
NOVT, OMST, TKT,
VLAT, WST, YAKT,
YEKT now follow their
current meanings, and VOLT
(Europe/Volgograd) and MIST
(Antarctica/Macquarie) are added to the default
abbreviations list.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.3 released on 2013-09-09 - docs
Prevent non-key-field row updates from blocking foreign key checks (Álvaro Herrera, Noah Misch, Andres Freund, Alexander Shulgin, Marti Raudsepp, Alexander Shulgin)
This change improves concurrency and reduces the
probability of deadlocks when updating tables
involved in a foreign-key constraint. UPDATEs that do not change any
columns referenced in a foreign key now take the new
NO KEY UPDATE lock mode
on the row, while foreign key checks use the new
KEY SHARE lock mode,
which does not conflict with NO
KEY UPDATE. So there is no blocking unless a
foreign-key column is changed.
Add configuration variable
lock_timeout to allow limiting how long a
session will wait to acquire any one lock (Zoltán
Böszörményi)
Add SP-GiST support for range data types (Alexander Korotkov)
Allow GiST indexes to be unlogged (Jeevan Chalke)
Improve performance of GiST index insertion by randomizing the choice of which page to descend to when there are multiple equally good alternatives (Heikki Linnakangas)
Improve concurrency of hash index operations (Robert Haas)
Collect and use histograms of upper and lower bounds, as well as range lengths, for range types (Alexander Korotkov)
Improve optimizer's cost estimation for index access (Tom Lane)
Improve optimizer's hash table size estimate for
doing DISTINCT via hash
aggregation (Tom Lane)
Suppress no-op Result and Limit plan nodes (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Amit Kapila, Tom Lane)
Reduce optimizer overhead by not keeping plans on the basis of cheap startup cost when the optimizer only cares about total cost overall (Tom Lane)
Add COPY FREEZE
option to avoid the overhead of marking tuples as
frozen later (Simon Riggs, Jeff Davis)
Improve performance of NUMERIC calculations (Kyotaro
Horiguchi)
Improve synchronization of sessions waiting for
commit_delay (Peter Geoghegan)
This greatly improves the usefulness of
commit_delay.
Improve performance of the CREATE TEMPORARY
TABLE ... ON COMMIT DELETE ROWS option by
not truncating such temporary tables in transactions
that haven't touched any temporary tables (Heikki
Linnakangas)
Make vacuum recheck visibility after it has removed expired tuples (Pavan Deolasee)
This increases the chance of a page being marked as all-visible.
Add per-resource-owner lock caches (Jeff Janes)
This speeds up lock bookkeeping at statement completion in multi-statement transactions that hold many locks; it is particularly useful for pg_dump.
Avoid scanning the entire relation cache at commit of a transaction that creates a new relation (Jeff Janes)
This speeds up sessions that create many tables in successive small transactions, such as a pg_restore run.
Improve performance of transactions that drop many relations (Tomas Vondra)
Add optional ability to checksum data pages and report corruption (Simon Riggs, Jeff Davis, Greg Smith, Ants Aasma)
The checksum option can be set during initdb.
Split the statistics collector's data file into separate global and per-database files (Tomas Vondra)
This reduces the I/O required for statistics tracking.
Fix the statistics collector to operate properly in cases where the system clock goes backwards (Tom Lane)
Previously, statistics collection would stop until the time again reached the latest time previously recorded.
Emit an informative message to postmaster standard error when we are about to stop logging there (Tom Lane)
This should help reduce user confusion about where to look for log output in common configurations that log to standard error only during postmaster startup.
When an authentication failure occurs, log the
relevant pg_hba.conf line, to ease
debugging of unintended failures (Magnus
Hagander)
Improve LDAP error reporting and documentation (Peter Eisentraut)
Add support for specifying LDAP authentication parameters in URL format, per RFC 4516 (Peter Eisentraut)
Change the
ssl_ciphers parameter to start with
DEFAULT, rather than
ALL, then remove
insecure ciphers (Magnus Hagander)
This should yield a more appropriate SSL cipher set.
Parse and load pg_ident.conf once, not during
each connection (Amit Kapila)
This is similar to how pg_hba.conf is processed.
Greatly reduce System V shared memory requirements (Robert Haas)
On Unix-like systems, mmap() is now used for most of
PostgreSQL's shared
memory. For most users, this will eliminate any need
to adjust kernel parameters for shared memory.
Allow the postmaster to listen on multiple Unix-domain sockets (Honza Horák)
The configuration parameter unix_socket_directory is replaced by
unix_socket_directories, which
accepts a list of directories.
Allow a directory of configuration files to be processed (Magnus Hagander, Greg Smith, Selena Deckelmann)
Such a directory is specified with
include_dir in the server configuration
file.
Increase the maximum initdb-configured value for
shared_buffers to 128MB (Robert Haas)
This is the maximum value that initdb will attempt
to set in
postgresql.conf;
the previous maximum was 32MB.
Remove the external PID file, if any, on postmaster exit (Peter Eisentraut)
Allow a streaming replication standby to follow a timeline switch (Heikki Linnakangas)
This allows streaming standby servers to receive WAL data from a slave newly promoted to master status. Previously, other standbys would require a resync to begin following the new master.
Add SQL functions
pg_is_in_backup() and pg_backup_start_time() (Gilles
Darold)
These functions report the status of base backups.
Improve performance of streaming log shipping with
synchronous_commit disabled (Andres
Freund)
Allow much faster promotion of a streaming standby to primary (Simon Riggs, Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Add the last checkpoint's redo location to pg_controldata's output (Fujii Masao)
This information is useful for determining which WAL files are needed for restore.
Allow tools like pg_receivexlog to run on computers with different architectures (Heikki Linnakangas)
WAL files can still only be replayed on servers with the same architecture as the primary; but they can now be transmitted to and stored on machines of any architecture, since the streaming replication protocol is now machine-independent.
Make pg_basebackup --write-recovery-conf output a minimal
recovery.conf file
(Zoltán Böszörményi, Magnus Hagander)
This simplifies setting up a standby server.
Allow pg_receivexlog and pg_basebackup --xlog-method to handle streaming
timeline switches (Heikki Linnakangas)
Add
wal_receiver_timeout
parameter to control the WAL receiver's timeout (Amit
Kapila)
This allows more rapid detection of connection failure.
Change the WAL record format to allow splitting the record header across pages (Heikki Linnakangas)
The new format is slightly more compact, and is more efficient to write.
Implement SQL-standard LATERAL option for FROM-clause subqueries and function
calls (Tom Lane)
This feature allows subqueries and functions in
FROM to reference columns
from other tables in the FROM clause. The LATERAL keyword is optional for
functions.
Add support for piping COPY and psql \copy data to/from an external program
(Etsuro Fujita)
Allow a multirow VALUES clause in a rule to
reference OLD/NEW (Tom Lane)
Add support for event triggers (Dimitri Fontaine, Robert Haas, Álvaro Herrera)
This allows server-side functions written in event-enabled languages to be called when DDL commands are run.
Allow foreign data wrappers to support writes (inserts/updates/deletes) on foreign tables (KaiGai Kohei)
Add CREATE
SCHEMA ... IF NOT EXISTS clause (Fabrízio de
Royes Mello)
Make REASSIGN
OWNED also change ownership of shared
objects (Álvaro Herrera)
Make CREATE
AGGREGATE complain if the given initial
value string is not valid input for the transition
datatype (Tom Lane)
Suppress CREATE
TABLE's messages about implicit index and
sequence creation (Robert Haas)
These messages now appear at DEBUG1 verbosity, so that they will
not be shown by default.
Allow DROP TABLE IF
EXISTS to succeed when a non-existent schema
is specified in the table name (Bruce Momjian)
Previously, it threw an error if the schema did not exist.
Provide clients with constraint violation details as separate fields (Pavel Stehule)
This allows clients to retrieve table, column, data type, or constraint name error details. Previously such information had to be extracted from error strings. Client library support is required to access these fields.
Support IF NOT EXISTS
option in ALTER TYPE
... ADD VALUE (Andrew Dunstan)
This is useful for conditionally adding values to enumerated types.
Add ALTER ROLE
ALL SET to establish settings for all
users (Peter Eisentraut)
This allows settings to apply to all users in all
databases. ALTER DATABASE
SET already allowed addition of settings
for all users in a single database. postgresql.conf has a similar
effect.
Add support for ALTER RULE ... RENAME (Ali
Dar)
Add materialized views (Kevin Grittner)
Unlike ordinary views, where the base tables are read on every access, materialized views create physical tables at creation or refresh time. Access to the materialized view then reads from its physical table. There is not yet any facility for incrementally refreshing materialized views or auto-accessing them via base table access.
Make simple views auto-updatable (Dean Rasheed)
Simple views that reference some or all columns
from a single base table are now updatable by
default. More complex views can be made updatable
using INSTEAD
OF triggers or INSTEAD
rules.
Add CREATE
RECURSIVE VIEW syntax (Peter
Eisentraut)
Internally this is translated into CREATE VIEW ... WITH RECURSIVE
....
Improve view/rule printing code to handle cases where referenced tables are renamed, or columns are renamed, added, or dropped (Tom Lane)
Table and column renamings can produce cases where, if we merely substitute the new name into the original text of a rule or view, the result is ambiguous. This change fixes the rule-dumping code to insert manufactured table and column aliases when needed to preserve the original semantics.
Increase the maximum size of large objects from 2GB to 4TB (Nozomi Anzai, Yugo Nagata)
This change includes adding 64-bit-capable large object access functions, both in the server and in libpq.
Allow text timezone designations,
e.g. “America/Chicago”, in the
“T” field of ISO-format timestamptz input (Bruce Momjian)
Add operators
and functions to extract elements from
JSON values (Andrew
Dunstan)
Allow JSON values to be
converted
into records (Andrew Dunstan)
Add functions
to convert scalars, records, and hstore values to JSON (Andrew Dunstan)
Add array_remove() and array_replace() functions (Marco
Nenciarini, Gabriele Bartolini)
Allow
concat() and format() to properly expand
VARIADIC-labeled arguments
(Pavel Stehule)
Improve format() to provide field width
and left/right alignment options (Pavel Stehule)
Make
to_char(),
to_date(), and
to_timestamp() handle negative (BC) century
values properly (Bruce Momjian)
Previously the behavior was either wrong or inconsistent with positive/AD handling, e.g. with the format mask “IYYY-IW-DY”.
Make
to_date() and
to_timestamp() return proper results when
mixing ISO and
Gregorian week/day designations (Bruce Momjian)
Cause
pg_get_viewdef() to
start a new line by default after each SELECT target list entry and
FROM entry (Marko
Tiikkaja)
This reduces line length in view printing, for instance in pg_dump output.
Fix map_sql_value_to_xml_value() to print
values of domain types the same way their base type
would be printed (Pavel Stehule)
There are special formatting rules for certain
built-in types such as boolean; these rules now also apply to
domains over these types.
Allow PL/pgSQL to use RETURN with a composite-type
expression (Asif Rehman)
Previously, in a function returning a composite
type, RETURN could only
reference a variable of that type.
Allow PL/pgSQL to access constraint violation details as separate fields (Pavel Stehule)
Allow PL/pgSQL to access the number of rows
processed by COPY
(Pavel Stehule)
A COPY executed in a
PL/pgSQL function now updates the value retrieved by
GET DIAGNOSTICS x = ROW_COUNT.
Allow unreserved keywords to be used as identifiers everywhere in PL/pgSQL (Tom Lane)
In certain places in the PL/pgSQL grammar, keywords had to be quoted to be used as identifiers, even if they were nominally unreserved.
Add PL/Python result object string handler (Peter Eisentraut)
This allows plpy.debug(rv) to output something
reasonable.
Make PL/Python convert OID values to a proper Python numeric type (Peter Eisentraut)
Handle
SPI errors raised explicitly (with
PL/Python's RAISE) the
same as internal SPI errors (Oskari Saarenmaa and
Jan Urbanski)
Prevent leakage of SPI tuple tables during subtransaction abort (Tom Lane)
At the end of any failed subtransaction, the core
SPI code now releases any SPI tuple tables that were
created during that subtransaction. This avoids the
need for SPI-using code to keep track of such tuple
tables and release them manually in error-recovery
code. Failure to do so caused a number of
transaction-lifespan memory leakage issues in PL/pgSQL
and perhaps other SPI clients. SPI_freetuptable() now protects
itself against multiple freeing requests, so any
existing code that did take care to clean up shouldn't
be broken by this change.
Allow SPI
functions to access the number of rows processed by
COPY (Pavel
Stehule)
Add command-line utility pg_isready to check if the server is ready to accept connections (Phil Sorber)
Support multiple --table
arguments for pg_restore, clusterdb,
reindexdb, and vacuumdb (Josh
Kupershmidt)
This is similar to the way pg_dump's --table option works.
Add --dbname option to
pg_dumpall, pg_basebackup, and pg_receivexlog to allow
specifying a connection string (Amit Kapila)
Add libpq function PQconninfo() to return connection
information (Zoltán Böszörményi, Magnus Hagander)
Adjust function cost settings so psql tab completion and pattern searching are more efficient (Tom Lane)
Improve psql's tab completion coverage (Jeff Janes, Dean Rasheed, Peter Eisentraut, Magnus Hagander)
Allow the psql
--single-transaction mode
to work when reading from standard input (Fabien
Coelho, Robert Haas)
Previously this option only worked when reading from a file.
Remove psql warning when connecting to an older server (Peter Eisentraut)
A warning is still issued when connecting to a server of a newer major version than psql's.
Add psql
command \watch to
repeatedly execute a SQL command (Will
Leinweber)
Add psql
command \gset to store
query results in psql variables (Pavel
Stehule)
Add SSL
information to psql's \conninfo command (Alastair
Turner)
Add “Security” column to
psql's
\df+ output (Jon
Erdman)
Allow psql
command \l to accept a
database name pattern (Peter Eisentraut)
In psql, do not
allow \connect to use
defaults if there is no active connection (Bruce
Momjian)
This might be the case if the server had crashed.
Properly reset state after failure of a SQL
command executed with psql's \g file (Tom Lane)
Previously, the output from subsequent SQL commands would unexpectedly continue to go to the same file.
Add a latex-longtable output format to
psql (Bruce
Momjian)
This format allows tables to span multiple pages.
Add a border=3
output mode to the psql latex format (Bruce Momjian)
In psql's tuples-only and expanded output modes, no longer emit “(No rows)” for zero rows (Peter Eisentraut)
In psql's unaligned, expanded output mode, no longer print an empty line for zero rows (Peter Eisentraut)
Add pg_dump
--jobs option to dump
tables in parallel (Joachim Wieland)
Make pg_dump output functions in a more predictable order (Joel Jacobson)
Fix tar files emitted by pg_dump to be POSIX conformant (Brian Weaver, Tom Lane)
Add --dbname option to
pg_dump, for
consistency with other client commands (Heikki
Linnakangas)
The database name could already be supplied last without a flag.
Make initdb fsync the newly created data directory (Jeff Davis)
This insures data integrity in event of a system
crash shortly after initdb. This can be disabled by
using --nosync.
Add initdb --sync-only
option to sync the data directory to durable storage
(Bruce Momjian)
This is used by pg_upgrade.
Make initdb issue a warning about placing the data directory at the top of a file system mount point (Bruce Momjian)
Add infrastructure to allow plug-in background worker processes (Álvaro Herrera)
Create a centralized timeout API (Zoltán Böszörményi)
Create libpgcommon and move pg_malloc() and other functions there
(Álvaro Herrera, Andres Freund)
This allows libpgport to be used solely for portability-related code.
Add support for list links embedded in larger structs (Andres Freund)
Use SA_RESTART for all
signals, including SIGALRM
(Tom Lane)
Ensure that the correct text domain is used when
translating errcontext()
messages (Heikki Linnakangas)
Standardize naming of client-side memory allocation functions (Tom Lane)
Provide support for “static assertions” that will fail at compile time if some compile-time-constant condition is not met (Andres Freund, Tom Lane)
Support Assert() in
client-side code (Andrew Dunstan)
Add decoration to inform the C compiler that some
ereport() and
elog() calls do not
return (Peter Eisentraut, Andres Freund, Tom Lane,
Heikki Linnakangas)
Allow options to be passed to the regression test
output comparison utility via PG_REGRESS_DIFF_OPTS (Peter
Eisentraut)
Add isolation tests for CREATE INDEX
CONCURRENTLY (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
Remove typedefs for int2/int4 as
they are better represented as int16/int32
(Peter Eisentraut)
Fix install-strip on Mac OS X (Peter Eisentraut)
Remove configure flag --disable-shared, as it is no longer
supported (Bruce Momjian)
Rewrite pgindent in Perl (Andrew Dunstan)
Provide Emacs macro to set Perl formatting to match PostgreSQL's perltidy settings (Peter Eisentraut)
Run tool to check the keyword list whenever the backend grammar is changed (Tom Lane)
Change the way UESCAPE
is lexed, to significantly reduce the size of the lexer
tables (Heikki Linnakangas)
Centralize flex and bison make rules (Peter Eisentraut)
This is useful for pgxs authors.
Change many internal backend functions to return
object OIDs rather than void
(Dimitri Fontaine)
This is useful for event triggers.
Invent pre-commit/pre-prepare/pre-subcommit events for transaction callbacks (Tom Lane)
Loadable modules that use transaction callbacks might need modification to handle these new event types.
Add function
pg_identify_object()
to produce a machine-readable description of a database
object (Álvaro Herrera)
Add post-ALTER-object
server hooks (KaiGai Kohei)
Implement a generic binary heap and use it for Merge-Append operations (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
Provide a tool to help detect timezone abbreviation
changes when updating the src/timezone/data files (Tom
Lane)
Add pkg-config support for libpq and ecpg libraries (Peter Eisentraut)
Remove src/tools/backend, now that the
content is on the PostgreSQL wiki (Bruce
Momjian)
Split out WAL reading as an independent facility (Heikki Linnakangas, Andres Freund)
Use a 64-bit integer to represent
WAL positions
(XLogRecPtr) instead of
two 32-bit integers (Heikki Linnakangas)
Generally, tools that need to read the WAL format will need to be adjusted.
Allow PL/Python to support platform-specific include directories (Peter Eisentraut)
Allow PL/Python on OS X to build against custom versions of Python (Peter Eisentraut)
Add a Postgres foreign data wrapper contrib module to allow access to other Postgres servers (Shigeru Hanada)
This foreign data wrapper supports writes.
Add pg_xlogdump contrib program (Andres Freund)
Add support for indexing of regular-expression searches in pg_trgm (Alexander Korotkov)
Improve pg_trgm's handling of multibyte characters (Tom Lane)
On a platform that does not have the wcstombs() or
towlower() library functions, this could result in an
incompatible change in the contents of pg_trgm indexes for non-ASCII
data. In such cases, REINDEX those indexes to ensure
correct search results.
Add a pgstattuple function to report the size of the pending-insertions list of a GIN index (Fujii Masao)
Make oid2name, pgbench, and vacuumlo set fallback_application_name (Amit
Kapila)
Improve output of pg_test_timing (Bruce Momjian)
Improve output of pg_test_fsync (Peter Geoghegan)
Create a dedicated foreign data wrapper, with its own option validator function, for dblink (Shigeru Hanada)
When using this FDW to define the target of a dblink connection, instead of using a hard-wired list of connection options, the underlying libpq library is consulted to see what connection options it supports.
Allow pg_upgrade to do dumps and restores in parallel (Bruce Momjian, Andrew Dunstan)
This allows parallel schema dump/restore of
databases, as well as parallel copy/link of data
files per tablespace. Use the --jobs option to specify the level of
parallelism.
Make pg_upgrade create Unix-domain sockets in the current directory (Bruce Momjian, Tom Lane)
This reduces the possibility that someone will accidentally connect during the upgrade.
Make pg_upgrade
--check mode properly
detect the location of non-default socket directories
(Bruce Momjian, Tom Lane)
Improve performance of pg_upgrade for databases with many tables (Bruce Momjian)
Improve pg_upgrade's logs by showing executed commands (Álvaro Herrera)
Improve pg_upgrade's status display during copy/link (Bruce Momjian)
Add --foreign-keys
option to pgbench
(Jeff Janes)
This adds foreign key constraints to the standard tables created by pgbench, for use in foreign key performance testing.
Allow pgbench to
aggregate performance statistics and produce output
every --aggregate-interval seconds (Tomas
Vondra)
Add pgbench
--sampling-rate option to
control the percentage of transactions logged (Tomas
Vondra)
Reduce and improve the status message output of pgbench's initialization mode (Robert Haas, Peter Eisentraut)
Add pgbench
-q mode to print one
output line every five seconds (Tomas Vondra)
Output pgbench elapsed and estimated remaining time during initialization (Tomas Vondra)
Allow pgbench to
use much larger scale factors, by changing relevant
columns from integer to
bigint when the requested
scale factor exceeds 20000 (Greg Smith)
Allow EPUB-format documentation to be created (Peter Eisentraut)
Update FreeBSD kernel configuration documentation (Brad Davis)
Improve WINDOW function documentation
(Bruce Momjian, Florian Pflug)
Add instructions for setting up the documentation tool chain on macOS (Peter Eisentraut)
Improve commit_delay documentation (Peter
Geoghegan)
⇑ Upgrade to 9.3.1 released on 2013-10-10 - docs
Ensure new-in-9.3 JSON functionality is added to the
hstore extension during an
update (Andrew Dunstan)
Users who upgraded a pre-9.3 database containing
hstore should execute
ALTER EXTENSION hstore UPDATE;
after installing 9.3.1, to add two new JSON functions
and a cast. (If hstore is
already up to date, this command does nothing.)
Fix memory leak when creating B-tree indexes on range columns (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix memory leak caused by lo_open() failure (Heikki
Linnakangas)
Serializable snapshot fixes (Kevin Grittner, Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix deadlock bug in libpq when using SSL (Stephen Frost)
Fix timeline handling bugs in pg_receivexlog (Heikki Linnakangas, Andrew Gierth)
Prevent CREATE FUNCTION
from checking SET variables
unless function body checking is enabled (Tom Lane)
Remove rare inaccurate warning during vacuum of index-less tables (Heikki Linnakangas)
⇑ Upgrade to 9.3.2 released on 2013-12-05 - docs
Fix VACUUM's tests to see
whether it can update relfrozenxid (Andres Freund)
In some cases VACUUM
(either manual or autovacuum) could incorrectly advance a
table's relfrozenxid
value, allowing tuples to escape freezing, causing those
rows to become invisible once 2^31 transactions have
elapsed. The probability of data loss is fairly low since
multiple incorrect advancements would need to happen
before actual loss occurs, but it's not zero. In 9.2.0
and later, the probability of loss is higher, and it's
also possible to get “could not access status of
transaction” errors as a consequence of
this bug. Users upgrading from releases 9.0.4 or 8.4.8 or
earlier are not affected, but all later versions contain
the bug.
The issue can be ameliorated by, after upgrading,
vacuuming all tables in all databases while having
vacuum_freeze_table_age set to zero. This will
fix any latent corruption but will not be able to fix all
pre-existing data errors. However, an installation can be
presumed safe after performing this vacuuming if it has
executed fewer than 2^31 update transactions in its
lifetime (check this with SELECT
txid_current() < 2^31).
Fix multiple bugs in MultiXactId freezing (Andres Freund, Álvaro Herrera)
These bugs could lead to “could not access status of transaction” errors, or to duplicate or vanishing rows. Users upgrading from releases prior to 9.3.0 are not affected.
The issue can be ameliorated by, after upgrading,
vacuuming all tables in all databases while having
vacuum_freeze_table_age set to zero. This will
fix latent corruption but will not be able to fix all
pre-existing data errors.
As a separate issue, these bugs can also cause standby servers to get out of sync with the primary, thus exhibiting data errors that are not in the primary. Therefore, it's recommended that 9.3.0 and 9.3.1 standby servers be re-cloned from the primary (e.g., with a new base backup) after upgrading.
Fix initialization of pg_clog and pg_subtrans during hot standby startup
(Andres Freund, Heikki Linnakangas)
This bug can cause data loss on standby servers at the moment they start to accept hot-standby queries, by marking committed transactions as uncommitted. The likelihood of such corruption is small unless, at the time of standby startup, the primary server has executed many updating transactions since its last checkpoint. Symptoms include missing rows, rows that should have been deleted being still visible, and obsolete versions of updated rows being still visible alongside their newer versions.
This bug was introduced in versions 9.3.0, 9.2.5, 9.1.10, and 9.0.14. Standby servers that have only been running earlier releases are not at risk. It's recommended that standby servers that have ever run any of the buggy releases be re-cloned from the primary (e.g., with a new base backup) after upgrading.
Fix multiple bugs in update chain traversal (Andres Freund, Álvaro Herrera)
These bugs could result in incorrect behavior, such as locking or even updating the wrong row, in the presence of concurrent updates. Spurious “unable to fetch updated version of tuple” errors were also possible.
Fix dangling-pointer problem in fast-path locking (Tom Lane)
This could lead to corruption of the lock data structures in shared memory, causing “lock already held” and other odd errors.
Fix assorted race conditions in timeout management (Tom Lane)
These errors could result in a server process becoming unresponsive because it had blocked SIGALRM and/or SIGINT.
Truncate pg_multixact
contents during WAL replay (Andres Freund)
This avoids ever-increasing disk space consumption in standby servers.
Ensure an anti-wraparound VACUUM counts a page as scanned when
it's only verified that no tuples need freezing (Sergey
Burladyan, Jeff Janes)
This bug could result in failing to advance
relfrozenxid, so that
the table would still be thought to need another
anti-wraparound vacuum. In the worst case the database
might even shut down to prevent wraparound.
Fix full-table-vacuum request mechanism for MultiXactIds (Andres Freund)
This bug could result in large amounts of useless autovacuum activity.
Fix race condition in GIN index posting tree page deletion (Heikki Linnakangas)
This could lead to transient wrong answers or query failures.
Fix “unexpected spgdoinsert() failure” error during SP-GiST index creation (Teodor Sigaev)
Fix assorted bugs in materialized views (Kevin Grittner, Andres Freund)
Re-allow duplicate table aliases if they're within aliased JOINs (Tom Lane)
Historically PostgreSQL has accepted queries like
SELECT ... FROM tab1 x CROSS JOIN (tab2 x CROSS JOIN tab3 y) z
although a strict reading of the SQL standard would
forbid the duplicate usage of table alias x. A misguided change in 9.3.0 caused it
to reject some such cases that were formerly accepted.
Restore the previous behavior.
Avoid flattening a subquery whose SELECT list contains a volatile function
wrapped inside a sub-SELECT
(Tom Lane)
This avoids unexpected results due to extra evaluations of the volatile function.
Fix planner's processing of non-simple-variable subquery outputs nested within outer joins (Tom Lane)
This error could lead to incorrect plans for queries
involving multiple levels of subqueries within
JOIN syntax.
Fix incorrect planning in cases where the same
non-strict expression appears in multiple WHERE and outer JOIN equality clauses (Tom Lane)
Fix planner crash with whole-row reference to a subquery (Tom Lane)
Fix incorrect generation of optimized MIN()/MAX() plans for inheritance trees (Tom Lane)
The planner could fail in cases where the MIN()/MAX() argument was an expression rather than a simple variable.
Fix premature deletion of temporary files (Andres Freund)
Prevent intra-transaction memory leak when printing range values (Tom Lane)
This fix actually cures transient memory leaks in any datatype output function, but range types are the only ones known to have had a significant problem.
Fix memory leaks when reloading configuration files (Heikki Linnakangas, Hari Babu)
Prevent incorrect display of dropped columns in NOT NULL and CHECK constraint violation messages (Michael Paquier and Tom Lane)
Allow default arguments and named-argument notation for window functions (Tom Lane)
Previously, these cases were likely to crash.
Suppress trailing whitespace on each line when pretty-printing rules and views (Tom Lane)
9.3.0 generated such whitespace in many more cases than previous versions did. To reduce unexpected behavioral changes, suppress unnecessary whitespace in all cases.
Fix possible read past end of memory in rule printing (Peter Eisentraut)
Fix array slicing of int2vector and oidvector values (Tom Lane)
Expressions of this kind are now implicitly promoted
to regular int2 or oid arrays.
Return a valid JSON value when converting an empty
hstore value to json (Oskari Saarenmaa)
Fix incorrect behaviors when using a SQL-standard, simple GMT offset timezone (Tom Lane)
In some cases, the system would use the simple GMT
offset value when it should have used the regular
timezone setting that had prevailed before the simple
offset was selected. This change also causes the
timeofday function to honor
the simple GMT offset zone.
Prevent possible misbehavior when logging translations of Windows error codes (Tom Lane)
Properly quote generated command lines in pg_ctl (Naoya Anzai and Tom Lane)
This fix applies only to Windows.
Fix pg_dumpall to
work when a source database sets
default_transaction_read_only via
ALTER DATABASE SET (Kevin
Grittner)
Previously, the generated script would fail during restore.
Fix pg_isready to
handle its -d option properly
(Fabrízio de Royes Mello and Fujii Masao)
Fix parsing of WAL file names in pg_receivexlog (Heikki Linnakangas)
This error made pg_receivexlog unable to restart streaming after stopping, once at least 4 GB of WAL had been written.
Report out-of-disk-space failures properly in pg_upgrade (Peter Eisentraut)
Make ecpg search for quoted cursor names case-sensitively (Zoltán Böszörményi)
Fix ecpg's processing
of lists of variables declared varchar (Zoltán Böszörményi)
Make contrib/lo defend
against incorrect trigger definitions (Marc Cousin)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2013h for DST law changes in Argentina, Brazil, Jordan, Libya, Liechtenstein, Morocco, and Palestine. Also, new timezone abbreviations WIB, WIT, WITA for Indonesia.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.3.3 released on 2014-02-20 - docs
Shore up GRANT ... WITH ADMIN
OPTION restrictions (Noah Misch)
Granting a role without ADMIN
OPTION is supposed to prevent the grantee from
adding or removing members from the granted role, but
this restriction was easily bypassed by doing
SET ROLE first. The security
impact is mostly that a role member can revoke the access
of others, contrary to the wishes of his grantor.
Unapproved role member additions are a lesser concern,
since an uncooperative role member could provide most of
his rights to others anyway by creating views or
SECURITY DEFINER functions.
(CVE-2014-0060)
Prevent privilege escalation via manual calls to PL validator functions (Andres Freund)
The primary role of PL validator functions is to be
called implicitly during CREATE
FUNCTION, but they are also normal SQL functions
that a user can call explicitly. Calling a validator on a
function actually written in some other language was not
checked for and could be exploited for
privilege-escalation purposes. The fix involves adding a
call to a privilege-checking function in each validator
function. Non-core procedural languages will also need to
make this change to their own validator functions, if
any. (CVE-2014-0061)
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)
Prevent buffer overrun with long datetime strings (Noah Misch)
The MAXDATELEN constant
was too small for the longest possible value of type
interval, allowing a buffer
overrun in interval_out().
Although the datetime input functions were more careful
about avoiding buffer overrun, the limit was short enough
to cause them to reject some valid inputs, such as input
containing a very long timezone name. The ecpg library contained these
vulnerabilities along with some of its own.
(CVE-2014-0063)
Prevent buffer overrun due to integer overflow in size calculations (Noah Misch, Heikki Linnakangas)
Several functions, mostly type input functions, calculated an allocation size without checking for overflow. If overflow did occur, a too-small buffer would be allocated and then written past. (CVE-2014-0064)
Prevent overruns of fixed-size buffers (Peter Eisentraut, Jozef Mlich)
Use strlcpy() and
related functions to provide a clear guarantee that
fixed-size buffers are not overrun. Unlike the preceding
items, it is unclear whether these cases really represent
live issues, since in most cases there appear to be
previous constraints on the size of the input string.
Nonetheless it seems prudent to silence all Coverity
warnings of this type. (CVE-2014-0065)
Avoid crashing if crypt() returns NULL (Honza Horak,
Bruce Momjian)
There are relatively few scenarios in which
crypt() could return NULL,
but contrib/chkpass would
crash if it did. One practical case in which this could
be an issue is if libc
is configured to refuse to execute unapproved hashing
algorithms (e.g., “FIPS mode”). (CVE-2014-0066)
Document risks of make
check in the regression testing instructions (Noah
Misch, Tom Lane)
Since the temporary server started by make check uses “trust”
authentication, another user on the same machine could
connect to it as database superuser, and then potentially
exploit the privileges of the operating-system user who
started the tests. A future release will probably
incorporate changes in the testing procedure to prevent
this risk, but some public discussion is needed first. So
for the moment, just warn people against using
make check when there are
untrusted users on the same machine. (CVE-2014-0067)
Rework tuple freezing protocol (Álvaro Herrera, Andres Freund)
The logic for tuple freezing was unable to handle some cases involving freezing of multixact IDs, with the practical effect that shared row-level locks might be forgotten once old enough.
Fixing this required changing the WAL record format for tuple freezing. While this is no issue for standalone servers, when using replication it means that standby servers must be upgraded to 9.3.3 or later before their masters are. An older standby will be unable to interpret freeze records generated by a newer master, and will fail with a PANIC message. (In such a case, upgrading the standby should be sufficient to let it resume execution.)
Create separate GUC parameters to control multixact freezing (Álvaro Herrera)
9.3 requires multixact tuple labels to be frozen before they grow too old, in the same fashion as plain transaction ID labels have been frozen for some time. Previously, the transaction ID freezing parameters were used for multixact IDs too; but since the consumption rates of transaction IDs and multixact IDs can be quite different, this did not work very well. Introduce new settings vacuum_multixact_freeze_min_age, vacuum_multixact_freeze_table_age, and autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age to control when to freeze multixacts.
Account for remote row locks propagated by local updates (Álvaro Herrera)
If a row was locked by transaction A, and transaction B updated it, the new version of the row created by B would be locked by A, yet visible only to B. If transaction B then again updated the row, A's lock wouldn't get checked, thus possibly allowing B to complete when it shouldn't. This case is new in 9.3 since prior versions did not have any types of row locking that would permit another transaction to update the row at all.
This oversight could allow referential integrity
checks to give false positives (for instance, allow
deletes that should have been rejected). Applications
using the new commands SELECT FOR
KEY SHARE and SELECT FOR NO
KEY UPDATE might also have suffered locking
failures of this kind.
Prevent “forgetting” valid row locks when one of several holders of a row lock aborts (Álvaro Herrera)
This was yet another mechanism by which a shared row lock could be lost, thus possibly allowing updates that should have been prevented by foreign-key constraints.
Fix incorrect logic during update chain locking (Álvaro Herrera)
This mistake could result in spurious “could not serialize access
due to concurrent update” errors in
REPEATABLE READ and
SERIALIZABLE transaction
isolation modes.
Handle wraparound correctly during extension or
truncation of pg_multixact/members (Andres Freund,
Álvaro Herrera)
Fix handling of 5-digit filenames in pg_multixact/members (Álvaro
Herrera)
As of 9.3, these names can be more than 4 digits, but the directory cleanup code ignored such files.
Improve performance of multixact cache code (Álvaro Herrera)
Optimize updating a row that's already locked by the same transaction (Andres Freund, Álvaro Herrera)
This fixes a performance regression from pre-9.3
versions when doing SELECT FOR
UPDATE followed by UPDATE/DELETE.
During archive recovery, prefer highest timeline
number when WAL segments with the same ID are present in
both the archive and pg_xlog/ (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Previously, not-yet-archived segments could get ignored during recovery. This reverts an undesirable behavioral change in 9.3.0 back to the way things worked pre-9.3.
Fix possible mis-replay of WAL records when some segments of a relation aren't full size (Greg Stark, Tom Lane)
The WAL update could be applied to the wrong page, potentially many pages past where it should have been. Aside from corrupting data, this error has been observed to result in significant “bloat” of standby servers compared to their masters, due to updates being applied far beyond where the end-of-file should have been. This failure mode does not appear to be a significant risk during crash recovery, only when initially synchronizing a standby created from a base backup taken from a quickly-changing master.
Fix bug in determining when recovery has reached consistency (Tomonari Katsumata, Heikki Linnakangas)
In some cases WAL replay would mistakenly conclude that the database was already consistent at the start of replay, thus possibly allowing hot-standby queries before the database was really consistent. Other symptoms such as “PANIC: WAL contains references to invalid pages” were also possible.
Fix WAL logging of visibility map changes (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix improper locking of btree index pages while
replaying a VACUUM operation
in hot-standby mode (Andres Freund, Heikki Linnakangas,
Tom Lane)
This error could result in “PANIC: WAL contains references to invalid pages” failures.
Ensure that insertions into non-leaf GIN index pages write a full-page WAL record when appropriate (Heikki Linnakangas)
The previous coding risked index corruption in the event of a partial-page write during a system crash.
When pause_at_recovery_target and
recovery_target_inclusive
are both set, ensure the target record is applied before
pausing, not after (Heikki Linnakangas)
Ensure walreceiver sends hot-standby feedback messages on time even when there is a continuous stream of data (Andres Freund, Amit Kapila)
Prevent timeout interrupts from taking control away
from mainline code unless ImmediateInterruptOK is set (Andres
Freund, Tom Lane)
This is a serious issue for any application making use of statement timeouts, as it could cause all manner of strange failures after a timeout occurred. We have seen reports of “stuck” spinlocks, ERRORs being unexpectedly promoted to PANICs, unkillable backends, and other misbehaviors.
Fix race conditions during server process exit (Robert Haas)
Ensure that signal handlers don't attempt to use the
process's MyProc pointer
after it's no longer valid.
Fix race conditions in walsender shutdown logic and walreceiver SIGHUP signal handler (Tom Lane)
Fix unsafe references to errno within error reporting logic
(Christian Kruse)
This would typically lead to odd behaviors such as
missing or inappropriate HINT fields.
Fix possible crashes from using ereport() too early during server
startup (Tom Lane)
The principal case we've seen in the field is a crash if the server is started in a directory it doesn't have permission to read.
Clear retry flags properly in OpenSSL socket write function (Alexander Kukushkin)
This omission could result in a server lockup after unexpected loss of an SSL-encrypted connection.
Fix length checking for Unicode identifiers
(U&"..." syntax)
containing escapes (Tom Lane)
A spurious truncation warning would be printed for such identifiers if the escaped form of the identifier was too long, but the identifier actually didn't need truncation after de-escaping.
Fix parsing of Unicode literals and identifiers just before the end of a command string or function body (Tom Lane)
Allow keywords that are type names to be used in lists of roles (Stephen Frost)
A previous patch allowed such keywords to be used
without quoting in places such as role identifiers; but
it missed cases where a list of role identifiers was
permitted, such as DROP
ROLE.
Fix parser crash for EXISTS(SELECT * FROM zero_column_table)
(Tom Lane)
Fix possible crash due to invalid plan for nested
sub-selects, such as WHERE (... x
IN (SELECT ...) ...) IN (SELECT ...) (Tom
Lane)
Fix mishandling of WHERE
conditions pulled up from a LATERAL subquery (Tom Lane)
The typical symptom of this bug was a “JOIN qualification cannot refer to other relations” error, though subtle logic errors in created plans seem possible as well.
Disallow LATERAL
references to the target table of an UPDATE/DELETE (Tom Lane)
While this might be allowed in some future release, it was unintentional in 9.3, and didn't work quite right anyway.
Fix UPDATE/DELETE of an
inherited target table that has UNION ALL subqueries (Tom Lane)
Without this fix, UNION
ALL subqueries aren't correctly inserted into the
update plans for inheritance child tables after the first
one, typically resulting in no update happening for those
child table(s).
Fix ANALYZE to not fail
on a column that's a domain over a range type (Tom
Lane)
Ensure that ANALYZE
creates statistics for a table column even when all the
values in it are “too wide” (Tom Lane)
ANALYZE intentionally
omits very wide values from its histogram and
most-common-values calculations, but it neglected to do
something sane in the case that all the sampled entries
are too wide.
In ALTER TABLE ... SET
TABLESPACE, allow the database's default
tablespace to be used without a permissions check
(Stephen Frost)
CREATE TABLE has always
allowed such usage, but ALTER
TABLE didn't get the memo.
Fix support for extensions containing event triggers (Tom Lane)
Fix “cannot
accept a set” error when some arms of a
CASE return a set and others
don't (Tom Lane)
Fix memory leakage in JSON functions (Craig Ringer)
Properly distinguish numbers from non-numbers when generating JSON output (Andrew Dunstan)
Fix checks for all-zero client addresses in pgstat functions (Kevin Grittner)
Fix possible misclassification of multibyte characters by the text search parser (Tom Lane)
Non-ASCII characters could be misclassified when using C locale with a multibyte encoding. On Cygwin, non-C locales could fail as well.
Fix possible misbehavior in plainto_tsquery() (Heikki
Linnakangas)
Use memmove() not
memcpy() for copying
overlapping memory regions. There have been no field
reports of this actually causing trouble, but it's
certainly risky.
Fix placement of permissions checks in pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup() (Andres Freund, Magnus
Hagander)
The previous coding might attempt to do catalog access when it shouldn't.
Accept SHIFT_JIS as an
encoding name for locale checking purposes (Tatsuo
Ishii)
Fix *-qualification of
named parameters in SQL-language functions (Tom Lane)
Given a composite-type parameter named foo, $1.*
worked fine, but foo.* not
so much.
Fix misbehavior of PQhost() on Windows (Fujii Masao)
It should return localhost if no host has been
specified.
Improve error handling in libpq and psql for failures during
COPY TO STDOUT/FROM STDIN
(Tom Lane)
In particular this fixes an infinite loop that could
occur in 9.2 and up if the server connection was lost
during COPY FROM STDIN.
Variants of that scenario might be possible in older
versions, or with other client applications.
Fix incorrect translation handling in some
psql \d commands (Peter Eisentraut, Tom
Lane)
Ensure pg_basebackup's background process is killed when exiting its foreground process (Magnus Hagander)
Fix possible incorrect printing of filenames in pg_basebackup's verbose mode (Magnus Hagander)
Avoid including tablespaces inside PGDATA twice in base backups (Dimitri Fontaine, Magnus Hagander)
Fix misaligned descriptors in ecpg (MauMau)
In ecpg, handle lack of a hostname in the connection parameters properly (Michael Meskes)
Fix performance regression in contrib/dblink connection startup (Joe
Conway)
Avoid an unnecessary round trip when client and server encodings match.
In contrib/isn, fix
incorrect calculation of the check digit for ISMN values
(Fabien Coelho)
Fix contrib/pgbench's
progress logging to avoid overflow when the scale factor
is large (Tatsuo Ishii)
Fix contrib/pg_stat_statement's handling of
CURRENT_DATE and related
constructs (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Improve lost-connection error handling in contrib/postgres_fdw (Tom Lane)
Ensure client-code-only installation procedure works as documented (Peter Eisentraut)
In Mingw and Cygwin builds, install the libpq DLL in the bin directory (Andrew Dunstan)
This duplicates what the MSVC build has long done. It should fix problems with programs like psql failing to start because they can't find the DLL.
Avoid using the deprecated dllwrap tool in Cygwin builds (Marco
Atzeri)
Enable building with Visual Studio 2013 (Brar Piening)
Don't generate plain-text HISTORY and src/test/regress/README files anymore
(Tom Lane)
These text files duplicated the main HTML and PDF
documentation formats. The trouble involved in
maintaining them greatly outweighs the likely audience
for plain-text format. Distribution tarballs will still
contain files by these names, but they'll just be stubs
directing the reader to consult the main documentation.
The plain-text INSTALL file
will still be maintained, as there is arguably a use-case
for that.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2013i for DST law changes in Jordan and historical changes in Cuba.
In addition, the zones Asia/Riyadh87, Asia/Riyadh88, and Asia/Riyadh89 have been removed, as they
are no longer maintained by IANA, and never represented
actual civil timekeeping practice.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.3.4 released on 2014-03-20 - docs
Fix WAL replay of locking an already-updated tuple (Andres Freund, Álvaro Herrera)
This error caused updated rows to not be found by index scans, resulting in inconsistent query results depending on whether an index scan was used. Subsequent processing could result in constraint violations, since the previously updated row would not be found by later index searches, thus possibly allowing conflicting rows to be inserted. Since this error is in WAL replay, it would only manifest during crash recovery or on standby servers. The improperly-replayed case most commonly arises when a table row that is referenced by a foreign-key constraint is updated concurrently with creation of a referencing row.
Restore GIN metapages unconditionally to avoid torn-page risk (Heikki Linnakangas)
Although this oversight could theoretically result in a corrupted index, it is unlikely to have caused any problems in practice, since the active part of a GIN metapage is smaller than a standard 512-byte disk sector.
Avoid race condition in checking transaction commit
status during receipt of a NOTIFY message (Marko Tiikkaja)
This prevents a scenario wherein a sufficiently fast client might respond to a notification before database updates made by the notifier have become visible to the recipient.
Allow materialized views to be referenced in
UPDATE and DELETE commands (Michael Paquier)
Previously such queries failed with a complaint about not being able to lock rows in the materialized view.
Allow regular-expression operators to be terminated early by query cancel requests (Tom Lane)
This prevents scenarios wherein a pathological regular expression could lock up a server process uninterruptibly for a long time.
Remove incorrect code that tried to allow OVERLAPS with single-element row
arguments (Joshua Yanovski)
This code never worked correctly, and since the case is neither specified by the SQL standard nor documented, it seemed better to remove it than fix it.
Avoid getting more than AccessShareLock when de-parsing a rule
or view (Dean Rasheed)
This oversight resulted in pg_dump unexpectedly acquiring
RowExclusiveLock locks on
tables mentioned as the targets of INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE commands in rules. While usually
harmless, that could interfere with concurrent
transactions that tried to acquire, for example,
ShareLock on those
tables.
Improve performance of index endpoint probes during planning (Tom Lane)
This change fixes a significant performance problem that occurred when there were many not-yet-committed rows at the end of the index, which is a common situation for indexes on sequentially-assigned values such as timestamps or sequence-generated identifiers.
Use non-default selectivity estimates for value
IN (list)value operator ANY (array)
Remove the correct per-database statistics file during
DROP DATABASE (Tomas
Vondra)
This fix prevents a permanent leak of statistics file
space. Users who have done many DROP DATABASE commands since upgrading
to PostgreSQL 9.3 may
wish to check their statistics directory and delete
statistics files that do not correspond to any existing
database. Please note that db_0.stat should not be removed.
Fix walsender ping logic to avoid inappropriate disconnects under continuous load (Andres Freund, Heikki Linnakangas)
walsender failed to send ping messages to the client if it was constantly busy sending WAL data; but it expected to see ping responses despite that, and would therefore disconnect once wal_sender_timeout elapsed.
Fix walsender's failure to shut down cleanly when client is pg_receivexlog (Fujii Masao)
Check WAL level and hot standby parameters correctly when doing crash recovery that will be followed by archive recovery (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix test to see if hot standby connections can be allowed immediately after a crash (Heikki Linnakangas)
Add read-only data_checksums parameter to display whether page checksums are enabled (Heikki Linnakangas)
Without this parameter, determining the state of checksum processing was difficult.
Prevent interrupts while reporting non-ERROR messages (Tom Lane)
This guards against rare server-process freezeups due
to recursive entry to syslog(), and perhaps other related
problems.
Fix memory leak in PL/Perl when returning a composite result, including multiple-OUT-parameter cases (Alex Hunsaker)
Fix tracking of psql
script line numbers during \copy from out-of-line data (Kumar
Rajeev Rastogi, Amit Khandekar)
\copy ... from
incremented the script file line number for each data
line, even if the data was not coming from the script
file. This mistake resulted in wrong line numbers being
reported for any errors occurring later in the same
script file.
Fix contrib/postgres_fdw to handle multiple join conditions properly (Tom Lane)
This oversight could result in sending WHERE clauses to the remote server for
execution even though the clauses are not known to have
the same semantics on the remote server (for example,
clauses that use non-built-in operators). The query might
succeed anyway, but it could also fail with errors from
the remote server, or worse give silently wrong
answers.
Prevent intermittent “could not reserve shared memory region” failures on recent Windows versions (MauMau)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2014a for DST law changes in Fiji and Turkey, plus historical changes in Israel and Ukraine.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.3.5 released on 2014-07-24 - docs
In pg_upgrade, remove
pg_multixact files left
behind by initdb (Bruce
Momjian)
If you used a pre-9.3.5 version of pg_upgrade to upgrade a database
cluster to 9.3, it might have left behind a file
$PGDATA/pg_multixact/offsets/0000 that
should not be there and will eventually cause problems in
VACUUM. However, in common cases this file is
actually valid and must not be removed. To
determine whether your installation has this problem, run
this query as superuser, in any database of the
cluster:
WITH list(file) AS (SELECT * FROM pg_ls_dir('pg_multixact/offsets'))
SELECT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM list WHERE file = '0000') AND
NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM list WHERE file = '0001') AND
NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM list WHERE file = 'FFFF') AND
EXISTS (SELECT * FROM list WHERE file != '0000')
AS file_0000_removal_required;If this query returns t,
manually remove the file $PGDATA/pg_multixact/offsets/0000. Do
nothing if the query returns f.
Correctly initialize padding bytes in contrib/btree_gist indexes on
bit columns (Heikki
Linnakangas)
This error could result in incorrect query results due
to values that should compare equal not being seen as
equal. Users with GiST indexes on bit or bit
varying columns should REINDEX those indexes after installing
this update.
Protect against torn pages when deleting GIN list pages (Heikki Linnakangas)
This fix prevents possible index corruption if a system crash occurs while the page update is being written to disk.
Don't clear the right-link of a GiST index page while replaying updates from WAL (Heikki Linnakangas)
This error could lead to transiently wrong answers from GiST index scans performed in Hot Standby.
Fix corner-case infinite loop during insertion into an SP-GiST text index (Tom Lane)
Fix incorrect answers from SP-GiST index searches with
-|- (range adjacency)
operator (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix wraparound handling for pg_multixact/members (Álvaro
Herrera)
Truncate pg_multixact
during checkpoints, not during VACUUM (Álvaro Herrera)
This change ensures that pg_multixact segments can't be
removed if they'd still be needed during WAL replay after
a crash.
Fix possible inconsistency of all-visible flags after WAL recovery (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix possibly-incorrect cache invalidation during
nested calls to ReceiveSharedInvalidMessages (Andres
Freund)
Fix race condition when updating a tuple concurrently locked by another process (Andres Freund, Álvaro Herrera)
Fix “could not
find pathkey item to sort” planner failures
with UNION ALL over
subqueries reading from tables with inheritance children
(Tom Lane)
Don't assume a subquery's output is unique if there's a set-returning function in its targetlist (David Rowley)
This oversight could lead to misoptimization of
constructs like WHERE x IN (SELECT
y, generate_series(1,10) FROM t GROUP BY y).
Improve planner to drop constant-NULL inputs of
AND/OR when possible (Tom Lane)
This change fixes some cases where the more aggressive parameter substitution done by 9.2 and later can lead to a worse plan than older versions produced.
Ensure that the planner sees equivalent VARIADIC and non-VARIADIC function calls as equivalent
(Tom Lane)
This bug could for example result in failure to use expression indexes involving variadic functions. It might be necessary to re-create such indexes, and/or re-create views including variadic function calls that should match the indexes, for the fix to be effective for existing 9.3 installations.
Fix handling of nested JSON
objects in json_populate_recordset() and friends
(Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
A nested JSON object could
result in previous fields of the parent object not being
shown in the output.
Fix identification of input type category in
to_json() and friends (Tom
Lane)
This is known to have led to inadequate quoting of
money fields in the
JSON result, and there may have
been wrong results for other data types as well.
Fix failure to detoast fields in composite elements of structured types (Tom Lane)
This corrects cases where TOAST pointers could be copied into other tables without being dereferenced. If the original data is later deleted, it would lead to errors like “missing chunk number 0 for toast value ...” when the now-dangling pointer is used.
Fix “record type has not been registered” failures with whole-row references to the output of Append plan nodes (Tom Lane)
Fix possible crash when invoking a user-defined function while rewinding a cursor (Tom Lane)
Fix query-lifespan memory leak while evaluating the
arguments for a function in FROM (Tom Lane)
Fix session-lifespan memory leaks in regular-expression processing (Tom Lane, Arthur O'Dwyer, Greg Stark)
Fix data encoding error in hungarian.stop (Tom Lane)
Prevent foreign tables from being created with OIDS when default_with_oids is true (Etsuro Fujita)
Fix liveness checks for rows that were inserted in the current transaction and then deleted by a now-rolled-back subtransaction (Andres Freund)
This could cause problems (at least spurious warnings,
and at worst an infinite loop) if CREATE INDEX or CLUSTER were done later in the same
transaction.
Clear pg_stat_activity.xact_start during PREPARE TRANSACTION (Andres Freund)
After the PREPARE, the
originating session is no longer in a transaction, so it
should not continue to display a transaction start
time.
Fix REASSIGN OWNED to not
fail for text search objects (Álvaro Herrera)
Prevent pg_class.relminmxid values from going
backwards during VACUUM FULL
(Álvaro Herrera)
Reduce indentation in rule/view dumps to improve readability and avoid excessive whitespace (Greg Stark, Tom Lane)
This change reduces the amount of indentation applied to nested constructs, including some cases that the user probably doesn't think of as nested, such as UNION lists. Previously, deeply nested constructs were printed with an amount of whitespace growing as O(N^2), which created a performance problem and even risk of out-of-memory failures. Now the indentation is reduced modulo 40, which is initially odd to look at but seems to preserve readability better than simply limiting the indentation would do. Redundant parenthesization of UNION lists has been reduced as well.
Fix dumping of rules/views when subsequent addition of
a column has resulted in multiple input columns matching
a USING specification (Tom
Lane)
Repair view printing for some cases involving
functions in FROM that
return a composite type containing dropped columns (Tom
Lane)
Block signals during postmaster startup (Tom Lane)
This ensures that the postmaster will properly clean up after itself if, for example, it receives SIGINT while still starting up.
Fix client host name lookup when processing
pg_hba.conf entries that
specify host names instead of IP addresses (Tom Lane)
Ensure that reverse-DNS lookup failures are reported, instead of just silently not matching such entries. Also ensure that we make only one reverse-DNS lookup attempt per connection, not one per host name entry, which is what previously happened if the lookup attempts failed.
Allow the root user to use postgres -C variable and postgres --describe-config (MauMau)
The prohibition on starting the server as root does not need to extend to these operations, and relaxing it prevents failure of pg_ctl in some scenarios.
Secure Unix-domain sockets of temporary postmasters
started during make check
(Noah Misch)
Any local user able to access the socket file could
connect as the server's bootstrap superuser, then proceed
to execute arbitrary code as the operating-system user
running the test, as we previously noted in
CVE-2014-0067. This change defends against that risk by
placing the server's socket in a temporary, mode 0700
subdirectory of /tmp. The
hazard remains however on platforms where Unix sockets
are not supported, notably Windows, because then the
temporary postmaster must accept local TCP
connections.
A useful side effect of this change is to simplify
make check testing in builds
that override DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR. Popular
non-default values like /var/run/postgresql are often not
writable by the build user, requiring workarounds that
will no longer be necessary.
Fix tablespace creation WAL replay to work on Windows (MauMau)
Fix detection of socket creation failures on Windows (Bruce Momjian)
On Windows, allow new sessions to absorb values of PGC_BACKEND parameters (such as log_connections) from the configuration file (Amit Kapila)
Previously, if such a parameter were changed in the file post-startup, the change would have no effect.
Properly quote executable path names on Windows (Nikhil Deshpande)
This oversight could cause initdb and pg_upgrade to fail on Windows, if
the installation path contained both spaces and
@ signs.
Fix linking of libpython on macOS (Tom Lane)
The method we previously used can fail with the Python library supplied by Xcode 5.0 and later.
Avoid buffer bloat in libpq when the server consistently sends data faster than the client can absorb it (Shin-ichi Morita, Tom Lane)
libpq could be
coerced into enlarging its input buffer until it runs out
of memory (which would be reported misleadingly as
“lost
synchronization with server”). Under
ordinary circumstances it's quite far-fetched that data
could be continuously transmitted more quickly than the
recv() loop can absorb it,
but this has been observed when the client is
artificially slowed by scheduler constraints.
Ensure that LDAP lookup attempts in libpq time out as intended (Laurenz Albe)
Fix ecpg to do the
right thing when an array of char
* is the target for a FETCH statement returning
more than one row, as well as some other array-handling
fixes (Ashutosh Bapat)
Fix pg_dump to cope with a materialized view that depends on a table's primary key (Tom Lane)
This occurs if the view's query relies on functional
dependency to abbreviate a GROUP
BY list. pg_dump
got sufficiently confused that it dumped the materialized
view as a regular view.
Fix parsing of pg_dumpall's -i switch (Tom Lane)
Fix pg_restore's processing of old-style large object comments (Tom Lane)
A direct-to-database restore from an archive file generated by a pre-9.0 version of pg_dump would usually fail if the archive contained more than a few comments for large objects.
Fix pg_upgrade for cases where the new server creates a TOAST table but the old version did not (Bruce Momjian)
This rare situation would manifest as “relation OID mismatch” errors.
In pg_upgrade,
preserve pg_database.datminmxid and pg_class.relminmxid values from the old
cluster, or insert reasonable values when upgrading from
pre-9.3; also defend against unreasonable values in the
core server (Bruce Momjian, Álvaro Herrera, Tom Lane)
These changes prevent scenarios in which autovacuum might insist on scanning the entire cluster's contents immediately upon starting the new cluster, or in which tracking of unfrozen MXID values might be disabled completely.
Prevent contrib/auto_explain from changing the
output of a user's EXPLAIN
(Tom Lane)
If auto_explain is
active, it could cause an EXPLAIN
(ANALYZE, TIMING OFF) command to nonetheless print
timing information.
Fix query-lifespan memory leak in contrib/dblink (MauMau, Joe Conway)
In contrib/pgcrypto
functions, ensure sensitive information is cleared from
stack variables before returning (Marko Kreen)
Prevent use of already-freed memory in contrib/pgstattuple's pgstat_heap() (Noah Misch)
In contrib/uuid-ossp,
cache the state of the OSSP UUID library across calls
(Tom Lane)
This improves the efficiency of UUID generation and
reduces the amount of entropy drawn from /dev/urandom, on platforms that have
that.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2014e for DST law changes in Crimea, Egypt, and Morocco.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.4 released on 2014-12-18 - docs
Tighten checks for multidimensional array input (Bruce Momjian)
Previously, an input array string that started with a single-element sub-array could later contain multi-element sub-arrays, e.g. '{{1}, {2,3}}'::int[] would be accepted.
When converting values of type date, timestamp or timestamptz to JSON, render the values in a format compliant with ISO 8601 (Andrew Dunstan)
Previously such values were rendered according to the current DateStyle setting; but many JSON processors require timestamps to be in ISO 8601 format. If necessary, the previous behavior can be obtained by explicitly casting the datetime value to text before passing it to the JSON conversion function.
The json #> text[] path extraction operator now returns its lefthand input, not NULL, if the array is empty (Tom Lane)
This is consistent with the notion that this represents zero applications of the simple field/element extraction operator ->. Similarly, json #>> text[] with an empty array merely coerces its lefthand input to text.
Corner cases in the JSON field/element/path extraction operators now return NULL rather than raising an error (Tom Lane)
For example, applying field extraction to a JSON array now yields NULL not an error. This is more consistent (since some comparable cases such as no-such-field already returned NULL), and it makes it safe to create expression indexes that use these operators, since they will now not throw errors for any valid JSON input.
Cause consecutive whitespace in to_timestamp() and to_date() format strings to consume a corresponding number of characters in the input string (whitespace or not), then conditionally consume adjacent whitespace, if not in FX mode (Jeevan Chalke)
Previously, consecutive whitespace characters in a non-FX format string behaved like a single whitespace character and consumed all adjacent whitespace in the input string. For example, previously a format string of three spaces would consume only the first space in ' 12', but it will now consume all three characters.
Fix ts_rank_cd() to ignore stripped lexemes (Alex Hill)
Previously, stripped lexemes were treated as if they had a default location, producing a rank of dubious usefulness.
For functions declared to take VARIADIC "any", an actual parameter marked as VARIADIC must be of a determinable array type (Pavel Stehule)
Such parameters can no longer be written as an undecorated string literal or NULL; a cast to an appropriate array data type will now be required. Note that this does not affect parameters not marked VARIADIC.
Ensure that whole-row variables expose the expected column names to functions that pay attention to column names within composite arguments (Tom Lane)
Constructs like row_to_json(tab.*) now always emit column names that match the column aliases visible for table tab at the point of the call. In previous releases the emitted column names would sometimes be the table's actual column names regardless of any aliases assigned in the query.
DISCARD now also discards sequence-related state (Fabrízio de Royes Mello, Robert Haas)
Rename EXPLAIN ANALYZE's "total runtime" output to "execution time" (Tom Lane)
Now that planning time is also reported, the previous name was confusing.
SHOW TIME ZONE now outputs simple numeric UTC offsets in POSIX timezone format (Tom Lane)
Previously, such timezone settings were displayed as interval values. The new output is properly interpreted by SET TIME ZONE when passed as a simple string, whereas the old output required special treatment to be re-parsed correctly.
Foreign data wrappers that support updating foreign tables must consider the possible presence of AFTER ROW triggers (Noah Misch)
When an AFTER ROW trigger is present, all columns of the table must be returned by updating actions, since the trigger might inspect any or all of them. Previously, foreign tables never had triggers, so the FDW might optimize away fetching columns not mentioned in the RETURNING clause (if any).
Prevent CHECK constraints from referencing system columns, except tableoid (Amit Kapila)
Previously such check constraints were allowed, but they would often cause errors during restores.
Use the last specified recovery target parameter if multiple target parameters are specified (Heikki Linnakangas)
Previously, there was an undocumented precedence order among the recovery_target_xxx parameters.
On Windows, automatically preserve quotes in command strings supplied by the user (Heikki Linnakangas)
User commands that did their own quote preservation might need adjustment. This is likely to be an issue for commands used in archive_command, restore_command, and COPY TO/FROM PROGRAM.
Remove catalog column pg_class.reltoastidxid (Michael Paquier)
Remove catalog column pg_rewrite.ev_attr (Kevin Grittner)
Per-column rules have not been supported since PostgreSQL 7.3.
Remove native support for Kerberos authentication (--with-krb5, etc) (Magnus Hagander)
The supported way to use Kerberos authentication is with GSSAPI. The native code has been deprecated since PostgreSQL 8.3.
In PL/Python, handle domains over arrays like the underlying array type (Rodolfo Campero)
Previously such values were treated as strings.
Make libpq's PQconnectdbParams() and PQpingParams() functions process zero-length strings as defaults (Adrian Vondendriesch)
Previously, these functions treated zero-length string values as selecting the default in only some cases.
Change empty arrays returned by the intarray module to be zero-dimensional arrays (Bruce Momjian)
Previously, empty arrays were returned as zero-length one-dimensional arrays, whose text representation looked the same as zero-dimensional arrays ({}), but they acted differently in array operations. intarray's behavior in this area now matches the built-in array operators.
pg_upgrade now uses -U or --username to specify the user name (Bruce Momjian)
Previously this option was spelled -u or --user, but that was inconsistent with other tools.
Allow background worker processes to be dynamically registered, started and terminated (Robert Haas)
The new worker_spi module shows an example of use of this feature.
Allow dynamic allocation of shared memory segments (Robert Haas, Amit Kapila)
This feature is illustrated in the test_shm_mq module.
During crash recovery or immediate shutdown, send uncatchable termination signals (SIGKILL) to child processes that do not shut down promptly (MauMau, Álvaro Herrera)
This reduces the likelihood of leaving orphaned child processes behind after postmaster shutdown, as well as ensuring that crash recovery can proceed if some child processes have become "stuck".
Improve randomness of the database system identifier (Tom Lane)
Make VACUUM properly report dead but not-yet-removable rows to the statistics collector (Hari Babu)
Previously these were reported as live rows.
Reduce GIN index size (Alexander Korotkov, Heikki Linnakangas)
Indexes upgraded via pg_upgrade will work fine but will still be in the old, larger GIN format. Use REINDEX to recreate old GIN indexes in the new format.
Improve speed of multi-key GIN lookups (Alexander Korotkov, Heikki Linnakangas)
Add GiST index support for inet and cidr data types (Emre Hasegeli)
Such indexes improve subnet and supernet lookups and ordering comparisons.
Fix rare race condition in B-tree page deletion (Heikki Linnakangas)
Make the handling of interrupted B-tree page splits more robust (Heikki Linnakangas)
Allow multiple backends to insert into WAL buffers concurrently (Heikki Linnakangas)
This improves parallel write performance.
Conditionally write only the modified portion of updated rows to WAL (Amit Kapila)
Improve performance of aggregate functions used as window functions (David Rowley, Florian Pflug, Tom Lane)
Improve speed of aggregates that use numeric state values (Hadi Moshayedi)
Attempt to freeze tuples when tables are rewritten with CLUSTER or VACUUM FULL (Robert Haas, Andres Freund)
This can avoid the need to freeze the tuples in the future.
Improve speed of COPY with default nextval() columns (Simon Riggs)
Improve speed of accessing many different sequences in the same session (David Rowley)
Raise hard limit on the number of tuples held in memory during sorting and B-tree index builds (Noah Misch)
Reduce memory allocated by PL/pgSQL DO blocks (Tom Lane)
Make the planner more aggressive about extracting restriction clauses from mixed AND/OR clauses (Tom Lane)
Disallow pushing volatile WHERE clauses down into DISTINCT subqueries (Tom Lane)
Pushing down a WHERE clause can produce a more efficient plan overall, but at the cost of evaluating the clause more often than is implied by the text of the query; so don't do it if the clause contains any volatile functions.
Auto-resize the catalog caches (Heikki Linnakangas)
This reduces memory consumption for sessions accessing only a few tables, and improves performance for sessions accessing many tables.
Add pg_stat_archiver system view to report WAL archiver activity (Gabriele Bartolini)
Add n_mod_since_analyze columns to pg_stat_all_tables and related system views (Mark Kirkwood)
These columns expose the system's estimate of the number of changed tuples since the table's last ANALYZE. This estimate drives decisions about when to auto-analyze.
Add backend_xid and backend_xmin columns to the system view pg_stat_activity, and a backend_xmin column to pg_stat_replication (Christian Kruse)
Add support for SSL ECDH key exchange (Marko Kreen)
This allows use of Elliptic Curve keys for server authentication. Such keys are faster and have better security than RSA keys. The new configuration parameter ssl_ecdh_curve controls which curve is used for ECDH.
Improve the default ssl_ciphers setting (Marko Kreen)
By default, the server not the client now controls the preference order of SSL ciphers (Marko Kreen)
Previously, the order specified by ssl_ciphers was usually ignored in favor of client-side defaults, which are not configurable in most PostgreSQL clients. If desired, the old behavior can be restored via the new configuration parameter ssl_prefer_server_ciphers.
Make log_connections show SSL encryption information (Andreas Kunert)
Improve SSL renegotiation handling (Álvaro Herrera)
Add new SQL command ALTER SYSTEM for changing postgresql.conf configuration file entries (Amit Kapila)
Previously such settings could only be changed by manually editing postgresql.conf.
Add autovacuum_work_mem configuration parameter to control the amount of memory used by autovacuum workers (Peter Geoghegan)
Add huge_pages parameter to allow using huge memory pages on Linux (Christian Kruse, Richard Poole, Abhijit Menon-Sen)
This can improve performance on large-memory systems.
Add max_worker_processes parameter to limit the number of background workers (Robert Haas)
This is helpful in configuring a standby server to have the required number of worker processes (the same as the primary).
Add superuser-only session_preload_libraries parameter to load libraries at session start (Peter Eisentraut)
In contrast to local_preload_libraries, this parameter can load any shared library, not just those in the $libdir/plugins directory.
Add wal_log_hints parameter to enable WAL logging of hint-bit changes (Sawada Masahiko)
Hint bit changes are not normally logged, except when checksums are enabled. This is useful for external tools like pg_rewind.
Increase the default settings of work_mem and maintenance_work_mem by four times (Bruce Momjian)
The new defaults are 4MB and 64MB respectively.
Increase the default setting of effective_cache_size to 4GB (Bruce Momjian, Tom Lane)
Allow printf-style space padding to be specified in log_line_prefix (David Rowley)
Allow terabyte units (TB) to be used when specifying configuration variable values (Simon Riggs)
Show PIDs of lock holders and waiters and improve information about relations in log_lock_waits log messages (Christian Kruse)
Reduce server logging level when loading shared libraries (Peter Geoghegan)
The previous level was LOG, which was too verbose for libraries loaded per-session.
On Windows, make SQL_ASCII-encoded databases and server processes (e.g., postmaster) emit messages in the character encoding of the server's Windows user locale (Alexander Law, Noah Misch)
Previously these messages were output in the Windows ANSI code page.
Add replication slots to coordinate activity on streaming standbys with the node they are streaming from (Andres Freund, Robert Haas)
Replication slots allow preservation of resources like WAL files on the primary until they are no longer needed by standby servers.
Add recovery parameter recovery_min_apply_delay to delay replication (Robert Haas, Fabrízio de Royes Mello, Simon Riggs)
Delaying replay on standby servers can be useful for recovering from user errors.
Add recovery_target option immediate to stop WAL recovery as soon as a consistent state is reached (MauMau, Heikki Linnakangas)
Improve recovery target processing (Heikki Linnakangas)
The timestamp reported by pg_last_xact_replay_timestamp() now reflects already-committed records, not transactions about to be committed. Recovering to a restore point now replays the restore point, rather than stopping just before the restore point.
pg_switch_xlog() now clears any unused trailing space in the old WAL file (Heikki Linnakangas)
This improves the compression ratio for WAL files.
Report failure return codes from external recovery commands (Peter Eisentraut)
Reduce spinlock contention during WAL replay (Heikki Linnakangas)
Write WAL records of running transactions more frequently (Andres Freund)
This allows standby servers to start faster and clean up resources more aggressively.
Add support for logical decoding of WAL data, to allow database changes to be streamed out in a customizable format (Andres Freund)
Add new wal_level setting logical to enable logical change-set encoding in WAL (Andres Freund)
Add table-level parameter REPLICA IDENTITY to control logical replication (Andres Freund)
Add relation option user_catalog_table to identify user-created tables involved in logical change-set encoding (Andres Freund)
Add pg_recvlogical application to receive logical-decoding data (Andres Freund)
Add test_decoding module to illustrate logical decoding at the SQL level (Andres Freund)
Add WITH ORDINALITY syntax to number the rows returned from a set-returning function in the FROM clause (Andrew Gierth, David Fetter)
This is particularly useful for functions like unnest().
Add ROWS FROM() syntax to allow horizontal concatenation of set-returning functions in the FROM clause (Andrew Gierth)
Allow SELECT to have an empty target list (Tom Lane)
This was added so that views that select from a table with zero columns can be dumped and restored correctly.
Ensure that SELECT ... FOR UPDATE NOWAIT does not wait in corner cases involving already-concurrently-updated tuples (Craig Ringer and Thomas Munro)
Add DISCARD SEQUENCES command to discard cached sequence-related state (Fabrízio de Royes Mello, Robert Haas)
DISCARD ALL will now also discard such information.
Add FORCE NULL option to COPY FROM, which causes quoted strings matching the specified null string to be converted to NULLs in CSV mode (Ian Barwick, Michael Paquier)
Without this option, only unquoted matching strings will be imported as null values.
Issue warnings for commands used outside of transaction blocks when they can have no effect (Bruce Momjian)
New warnings are issued for SET LOCAL, SET CONSTRAINTS, SET TRANSACTION and ABORT when used outside a transaction block.
Make EXPLAIN ANALYZE show planning time (Andreas Karlsson)
Make EXPLAIN show the grouping columns in Agg and Group nodes (Tom Lane)
Make EXPLAIN ANALYZE show exact and lossy block counts in bitmap heap scans (Etsuro Fujita)
Allow a materialized view to be refreshed without blocking other sessions from reading the view meanwhile (Kevin Grittner)
This is done with REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW CONCURRENTLY.
Allow views to be automatically updated even if they contain some non-updatable columns (Dean Rasheed)
Previously the presence of non-updatable output columns such as expressions, literals, and function calls prevented automatic updates. Now INSERTs, UPDATEs and DELETEs are supported, provided that they do not attempt to assign new values to any of the non-updatable columns.
Allow control over whether INSERTs and UPDATEs can add rows to an auto-updatable view that would not appear in the view (Dean Rasheed)
This is controlled with the new CREATE VIEW clause WITH CHECK OPTION.
Allow security barrier views to be automatically updatable (Dean Rasheed)
Support triggers on foreign tables (Ronan Dunklau)
Allow moving groups of objects from one tablespace to another using the ALL IN TABLESPACE ... SET TABLESPACE form of ALTER TABLE, ALTER INDEX, or ALTER MATERIALIZED VIEW (Stephen Frost)
Allow changing foreign key constraint deferrability via ALTER TABLE ... ALTER CONSTRAINT (Simon Riggs)
Reduce lock strength for some ALTER TABLE commands (Simon Riggs, Noah Misch, Robert Haas)
Specifically, VALIDATE CONSTRAINT, CLUSTER ON, SET WITHOUT CLUSTER, ALTER COLUMN SET STATISTICS, ALTER COLUMN SET (attribute_option), ALTER COLUMN RESET (attribute_option) no longer require ACCESS EXCLUSIVE locks.
Allow tablespace options to be set in CREATE TABLESPACE (Vik Fearing)
Formerly these options could only be set via ALTER TABLESPACE.
Allow CREATE AGGREGATE to define the estimated size of the aggregate's transition state data (Hadi Moshayedi)
Proper use of this feature allows the planner to better estimate how much memory will be used by aggregates.
Fix DROP IF EXISTS to avoid errors for non-existent objects in more cases (Pavel Stehule, Dean Rasheed)
Improve how system relations are identified (Andres Freund, Robert Haas)
Previously, relations once moved into the pg_catalog schema could no longer be modified or dropped.
Fully implement the line data type (Peter Eisentraut)
The line segment data type (lseg) has always been fully supported. The previous line data type (which was enabled only via a compile-time option) is not binary or dump-compatible with the new implementation.
Add pg_lsn data type to represent a WAL log sequence number (LSN) (Robert Haas, Michael Paquier)
Allow single-point polygons to be converted to circles (Bruce Momjian)
Support time zone abbreviations that change UTC offset from time to time (Tom Lane)
Previously, PostgreSQL assumed that the UTC offset associated with a time zone abbreviation (such as EST) never changes in the usage of any particular locale. However this assumption fails in the real world, so introduce the ability for a zone abbreviation to represent a UTC offset that sometimes changes. Update the zone abbreviation definition files to make use of this feature in timezone locales that have changed the UTC offset of their abbreviations since 1970 (according to the IANA timezone database). In such timezones, PostgreSQL will now associate the correct UTC offset with the abbreviation depending on the given date.
Allow 5+ digit years for non-ISO timestamp and date strings, where appropriate (Bruce Momjian)
Add checks for overflow/underflow of interval values (Bruce Momjian)
Add jsonb, a more capable and efficient data type for storing JSON data (Oleg Bartunov, Teodor Sigaev, Alexander Korotkov, Peter Geoghegan, Andrew Dunstan)
This new type allows faster access to values within a JSON document, and faster and more useful indexing of JSON columns. Scalar values in jsonb documents are stored as appropriate scalar SQL types, and the JSON document structure is pre-parsed rather than being stored as text as in the original json data type.
Add new JSON functions to allow for the construction of arbitrarily complex JSON trees (Andrew Dunstan, Laurence Rowe)
New functions include json_array_elements_text(), json_build_array(), json_object(), json_object_agg(), json_to_record(), and json_to_recordset().
Add json_typeof() to return the data type of a json value (Andrew Tipton)
Add pg_sleep_for(interval) and pg_sleep_until(timestamp) to specify delays more flexibly (Vik Fearing, Julien Rouhaud)
The existing pg_sleep() function only supports delays specified in seconds.
Add cardinality() function for arrays (Marko Tiikkaja)
This returns the total number of elements in the array, or zero for an array with no elements.
Add SQL functions to allow large object reads/writes at arbitrary offsets (Pavel Stehule)
Allow unnest() to take multiple arguments, which are individually unnested then horizontally concatenated (Andrew Gierth)
Add functions to construct times, dates, timestamps, timestamptzs, and intervals from individual values, rather than strings (Pavel Stehule)
These functions' names are prefixed with make_, e.g. make_date().
Make to_char()'s TZ format specifier return a useful value for simple numeric time zone offsets (Tom Lane)
Previously, to_char(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, 'TZ') returned an empty string if the timezone was set to a constant like -4.
Add timezone offset format specifier OF to to_char() (Bruce Momjian)
Improve the random seed used for random() (Honza Horak)
Tighten validity checking for Unicode code points in chr(int) (Tom Lane)
This function now only accepts values that are valid UTF8 characters according to RFC 3629.
Add functions for looking up objects in pg_class, pg_proc, pg_type, and pg_operator that do not generate errors for non-existent objects (Yugo Nagata, Nozomi Anzai, Robert Haas)
For example, to_regclass() does a lookup in pg_class similarly to the regclass input function, but it returns NULL for a non-existent object instead of failing.
Add function pg_filenode_relation() to allow for more efficient lookup of relation names from filenodes (Andres Freund)
Add parameter_default column to information_schema.parameters view (Peter Eisentraut)
Make information_schema.schemata show all accessible schemas (Peter Eisentraut)
Previously it only showed schemas owned by the current user.
Add control over which rows are passed into aggregate functions via the FILTER clause (David Fetter)
Support ordered-set (WITHIN GROUP) aggregates (Atri Sharma, Andrew Gierth, Tom Lane)
Add standard ordered-set aggregates percentile_cont(), percentile_disc(), mode(), rank(), dense_rank(), percent_rank(), and cume_dist() (Atri Sharma, Andrew Gierth)
Support VARIADIC aggregate functions (Tom Lane)
Allow polymorphic aggregates to have non-polymorphic state data types (Tom Lane)
This allows proper declaration in SQL of aggregates like the built-in aggregate array_agg().
Add event trigger support to PL/Perl and PL/Tcl (Dimitri Fontaine)
Convert numeric values to decimal in PL/Python (Szymon Guz, Ronan Dunklau)
Previously such values were converted to Python float values, risking loss of precision.
Add ability to retrieve the current PL/pgSQL call stack using GET DIAGNOSTICS (Pavel Stehule, Stephen Frost)
Add option print_strict_params to display the parameters passed to a query that violated a STRICT constraint (Marko Tiikkaja)
Add variables plpgsql.extra_warnings and plpgsql.extra_errors to enable additional PL/pgSQL warnings and errors (Marko Tiikkaja, Petr Jelinek)
Currently only warnings/errors about shadowed variables are available.
Make libpq's PQconndefaults() function ignore invalid service files (Steve Singer, Bruce Momjian)
Previously it returned NULL if an incorrect service file was encountered.
Accept TLS protocol versions beyond TLSv1 in libpq (Marko Kreen)
Add createuser option -g to specify role membership (Christopher Browne)
Add vacuumdb option --analyze-in-stages to analyze in stages of increasing granularity (Peter Eisentraut)
This allows minimal statistics to be created quickly.
Make pg_resetxlog with option -n output current and potentially changed values (Rajeev Rastogi)
Make initdb throw error for incorrect locale settings, rather than silently falling back to a default choice (Tom Lane)
Make pg_ctl return exit code 4 for an inaccessible data directory (Amit Kapila, Bruce Momjian)
This behavior more closely matches the Linux Standard Base (LSB) Core Specification.
On Windows, ensure that a non-absolute -D path specification is interpreted relative to pg_ctl's current directory (Kumar Rajeev Rastogi)
Previously it would be interpreted relative to whichever directory the underlying Windows service was started in.
Allow sizeof() in ECPG C array definitions (Michael Meskes)
Make ECPG properly handle nesting of C-style comments in both C and SQL text (Michael Meskes)
Suppress "No rows" output in psql expanded mode when the footer is disabled (Bruce Momjian)
Allow Control-C to abort psql when it's hung at connection startup (Peter Eisentraut)
Make psql's \db+ show tablespace options (Magnus Hagander)
Make \do+ display the functions that implement the operators (Marko Tiikkaja)
Make \d+ output an OID line only if an oid column exists in the table (Bruce Momjian)
Previously, the presence or absence of an oid column was always reported.
Make \d show disabled system triggers (Bruce Momjian)
Previously, if you disabled all triggers, only user triggers would show as disabled.
Fix \copy to no longer require a space between stdin and a semicolon (Etsuro Fujita)
Output the row count at the end of \copy, just like COPY already did (Kumar Rajeev Rastogi)
Fix \conninfo to display the server's IP address for connections using hostaddr (Fujii Masao)
Previously \conninfo could not display the server's IP address in such cases.
Show the SSL protocol version in \conninfo (Marko Kreen)
Add tab completion for \pset (Pavel Stehule)
Allow \pset with no arguments to show all settings (Gilles Darold)
Make \s display the name of the history file it wrote without converting it to an absolute path (Tom Lane)
The code previously attempted to convert a relative file name to an absolute path for display, but frequently got it wrong.
Allow pg_restore options -I, -P, -T and -n to be specified multiple times (Heikki Linnakangas)
This allows multiple objects to be restored in one operation.
Optionally add IF EXISTS clauses to the DROP commands emitted when removing old objects during a restore (Pavel Stehule)
This change prevents unnecessary errors when removing old objects. The new --if-exists option for pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and pg_restore is only available when --clean is also specified.
Add pg_basebackup option --xlogdir to specify the pg_xlog directory location (Haribabu Kommi)
Allow pg_basebackup to relocate tablespaces in the backup copy (Steeve Lennmark)
This is particularly useful for using pg_basebackup on the same machine as the primary.
Allow network-stream base backups to be throttled (Antonin Houska)
This can be controlled with the pg_basebackup --max-rate parameter.
Improve the way tuples are frozen to preserve forensic information (Robert Haas, Andres Freund)
This change removes the main objection to freezing tuples as soon as possible. Code that inspects tuple flag bits will need to be modified.
No longer require function prototypes for functions marked with the PG_FUNCTION_INFO_V1 macro (Peter Eisentraut)
This change eliminates the need to write boilerplate prototypes. Note that the PG_FUNCTION_INFO_V1 macro must appear before the corresponding function definition to avoid compiler warnings.
Remove SnapshotNow and HeapTupleSatisfiesNow() (Robert Haas)
All existing uses have been switched to more appropriate snapshot types. Catalog scans now use MVCC snapshots.
Add an API to allow memory allocations over one gigabyte (Noah Misch)
Add psprintf() to simplify memory allocation during string composition (Peter Eisentraut, Tom Lane)
Support printf() size modifier z to print size_t values (Andres Freund)
Change API of appendStringInfoVA() to better use vsnprintf() (David Rowley, Tom Lane)
Allow new types of external toast datums to be created (Andres Freund)
Add single-reader, single-writer, lightweight shared message queue (Robert Haas)
Improve spinlock speed on x86_64 CPUs (Heikki Linnakangas)
Remove spinlock support for unsupported platforms SINIX, Sun3, and NS32K (Robert Haas)
Remove IRIX port (Robert Haas)
Reduce the number of semaphores required by --disable-spinlocks builds (Robert Haas)
Rewrite duplicate_oids Unix shell script in Perl (Andrew Dunstan)
Add Test Anything Protocol (TAP) tests for client programs (Peter Eisentraut)
Currently, these tests are run by make check-world only if the --enable-tap-tests option was given to configure. This might become the default behavior in some future release.
Add make targets check-tests and installcheck-tests, which allow selection of individual tests to be run (Andrew Dunstan)
Remove maintainer-check makefile rule (Peter Eisentraut)
The default build rules now include all the formerly-optional tests.
Improve support for VPATH builds of PGXS modules (Cédric Villemain, Andrew Dunstan, Peter Eisentraut)
Upgrade to Autoconf 2.69 (Peter Eisentraut)
Add a configure flag that appends custom text to the PG_VERSION string (Oskari Saarenmaa)
This is useful for packagers building custom binaries.
Improve DocBook XML validity (Peter Eisentraut)
Fix various minor security and sanity issues reported by the Coverity scanner (Stephen Frost)
Improve detection of invalid memory usage when testing PostgreSQL with Valgrind (Noah Misch)
Improve sample Emacs configuration file emacs.samples (Peter Eisentraut)
Also add .dir-locals.el to the top of the source tree.
Allow pgindent to accept a command-line list of typedefs (Bruce Momjian)
Make pgindent smarter about blank lines around preprocessor conditionals (Bruce Momjian)
Avoid most uses of dlltool in Cygwin and Mingw builds (Marco Atzeri, Hiroshi Inoue)
Support client-only installs in MSVC (Windows) builds (MauMau)
Add pg_prewarm extension to preload relation data into the shared buffer cache at server start (Robert Haas)
This allows reaching full operating performance more quickly.
Add UUID random number generator gen_random_uuid() to pgcrypto (Oskari Saarenmaa)
This allows creation of version 4 UUIDs without requiring installation of uuid-ossp.
Allow uuid-ossp to work with the BSD or e2fsprogs UUID libraries, not only the OSSP UUID library (Matteo Beccati)
This improves the uuid-ossp module's portability since it no longer has to have the increasingly-obsolete OSSP library. The module's name is now rather a misnomer, but we won't change it.
Add option to auto_explain to include trigger execution time (Horiguchi Kyotaro)
Fix pgstattuple to not report rows from uncommitted transactions as dead (Robert Haas)
Make pgstattuple functions use regclass-type arguments (Satoshi Nagayasu)
While text-type arguments are still supported, they may be removed in a future major release.
Improve consistency of pgrowlocks output to honor snapshot rules more consistently (Robert Haas)
Improve pg_trgm's choice of trigrams for indexed regular expression searches (Alexander Korotkov)
This change discourages use of trigrams containing whitespace, which are usually less selective.
Allow pg_xlogdump to report a live log stream with --follow (Heikki Linnakangas)
Store cube data more compactly (Stas Kelvich)
Existing data must be dumped/restored to use the new format. The old format can still be read.
Reduce vacuumlo client-side memory usage by using a cursor (Andrew Dunstan)
Dramatically reduce memory consumption in pg_upgrade (Bruce Momjian)
Pass pg_upgrade's user name (-U) option to generated analyze scripts (Bruce Momjian)
Remove line length limit for pgbench scripts (Sawada Masahiko)
The previous line limit was BUFSIZ.
Add long option names to pgbench (Fabien Coelho)
Add pgbench option --rate to control the transaction rate (Fabien Coelho)
Add pgbench option --progress to print periodic progress reports (Fabien Coelho)
Make pg_stat_statements use a file, rather than shared memory, for query text storage (Peter Geoghegan)
This removes the previous limitation on query text length, and allows a higher number of unique statements to be tracked by default.
Allow reporting of pg_stat_statements's internal query hash identifier (Daniel Farina, Sameer Thakur, Peter Geoghegan)
Add the ability to retrieve all pg_stat_statements information except the query text (Peter Geoghegan)
This allows monitoring tools to fetch query text only for just-created entries, improving performance during repeated querying of the statistics.
Make pg_stat_statements ignore DEALLOCATE commands (Fabien Coelho)
It already ignored PREPARE, as well as planning time in general, so this seems more consistent.
Save the statistics file into $PGDATA/pg_stat at server shutdown, rather than $PGDATA/global (Fujii Masao)
⇑ Upgrade to 9.4.1 released on 2015-02-05 - docs
Fix buffer overruns in to_char() (Bruce Momjian)
When to_char() processes a numeric formatting template calling for a large number of digits, PostgreSQL would read past the end of a buffer. When processing a crafted timestamp formatting template, PostgreSQL would write past the end of a buffer. Either case could crash the server. We have not ruled out the possibility of attacks that lead to privilege escalation, though they seem unlikely. (CVE-2015-0241)
Fix buffer overrun in replacement *printf() functions (Tom Lane)
PostgreSQL includes a replacement implementation of printf and related functions. This code will overrun a stack buffer when formatting a floating point number (conversion specifiers e, E, f, F, g or G) with requested precision greater than about 500. This will crash the server, and we have not ruled out the possibility of attacks that lead to privilege escalation. A database user can trigger such a buffer overrun through the to_char() SQL function. While that is the only affected core PostgreSQL functionality, extension modules that use printf-family functions may be at risk as well.
This issue primarily affects PostgreSQL on Windows. PostgreSQL uses the system implementation of these functions where adequate, which it is on other modern platforms. (CVE-2015-0242)
Fix buffer overruns in contrib/pgcrypto (Marko Tiikkaja, Noah Misch)
Errors in memory size tracking within the pgcrypto module permitted stack buffer overruns and improper dependence on the contents of uninitialized memory. The buffer overrun cases can crash the server, and we have not ruled out the possibility of attacks that lead to privilege escalation. (CVE-2015-0243)
Fix possible loss of frontend/backend protocol synchronization after an error (Heikki Linnakangas)
If any error occurred while the server was in the middle of reading a protocol message from the client, it could lose synchronization and incorrectly try to interpret part of the message's data as a new protocol message. An attacker able to submit crafted binary data within a command parameter might succeed in injecting his own SQL commands this way. Statement timeout and query cancellation are the most likely sources of errors triggering this scenario. Particularly vulnerable are applications that use a timeout and also submit arbitrary user-crafted data as binary query parameters. Disabling statement timeout will reduce, but not eliminate, the risk of exploit. Our thanks to Emil Lenngren for reporting this issue. (CVE-2015-0244)
Fix information leak via constraint-violation error messages (Stephen Frost)
Some server error messages show the values of columns that violate a constraint, such as a unique constraint. If the user does not have SELECT privilege on all columns of the table, this could mean exposing values that the user should not be able to see. Adjust the code so that values are displayed only when they came from the SQL command or could be selected by the user. (CVE-2014-8161)
Lock down regression testing's temporary installations on Windows (Noah Misch)
Use SSPI authentication to allow connections only from the OS user who launched the test suite. This closes on Windows the same vulnerability previously closed on other platforms, namely that other users might be able to connect to the test postmaster. (CVE-2014-0067)
Cope with the Windows locale named "Norwegian (Bokmål)" (Heikki Linnakangas)
Non-ASCII locale names are problematic since it's not clear what encoding they should be represented in. Map the troublesome locale name to a plain-ASCII alias, "Norwegian_Norway".
9.4.0 mapped the troublesome name to "norwegian-bokmal", but that turns out not to work on all Windows configurations. "Norwegian_Norway" is now recommended instead.
Fix use-of-already-freed-memory problem in EvalPlanQual processing (Tom Lane)
In READ COMMITTED mode, queries that lock or update recently-updated rows could crash as a result of this bug.
Avoid possible deadlock while trying to acquire tuple locks in EvalPlanQual processing (Álvaro Herrera, Mark Kirkwood)
Fix failure to wait when a transaction tries to acquire a FOR NO KEY EXCLUSIVE tuple lock, while multiple other transactions currently hold FOR SHARE locks (Álvaro Herrera)
Improve performance of EXPLAIN with large range tables (Tom Lane)
Fix jsonb Unicode escape processing, and in consequence disallow \u0000 (Tom Lane)
Previously, the JSON Unicode escape \u0000 was accepted and was stored as those six characters; but that is indistinguishable from what is stored for the input \\u0000, resulting in ambiguity. Moreover, in cases where de-escaped textual output is expected, such as the ->> operator, the sequence was printed as \u0000, which does not meet the expectation that JSON escaping would be removed. (Consistent behavior would require emitting a zero byte, but PostgreSQL does not support zero bytes embedded in text strings.) 9.4.0 included an ill-advised attempt to improve this situation by adjusting JSON output conversion rules; but of course that could not fix the fundamental ambiguity, and it turned out to break other usages of Unicode escape sequences. Revert that, and to avoid the core problem, reject \u0000 in jsonb input.
If a jsonb column contains a \u0000 value stored with 9.4.0, it will henceforth read out as though it were \\u0000, which is the other valid interpretation of the data stored by 9.4.0 for this case.
The json type did not have the storage-ambiguity problem, but it did have the problem of inconsistent de-escaped textual output. Therefore \u0000 will now also be rejected in json values when conversion to de-escaped form is required. This change does not break the ability to store \u0000 in json columns so long as no processing is done on the values. This is exactly parallel to the cases in which non-ASCII Unicode escapes are allowed when the database encoding is not UTF8.
Fix namespace handling in xpath() (Ali Akbar)
Previously, the xml value resulting from an xpath() call would not have namespace declarations if the namespace declarations were attached to an ancestor element in the input xml value, rather than to the specific element being returned. Propagate the ancestral declaration so that the result is correct when considered in isolation.
Fix assorted oversights in range-operator selectivity estimation (Emre Hasegeli)
This patch fixes corner-case "unexpected operator NNNN" planner errors, and improves the selectivity estimates for some other cases.
Revert unintended reduction in maximum size of a GIN index item (Heikki Linnakangas)
9.4.0 could fail with "index row size exceeds maximum" errors for data that previous versions would accept.
Fix query-duration memory leak during repeated GIN index rescans (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix possible crash when using nonzero gin_fuzzy_search_limit (Heikki Linnakangas)
Assorted fixes for logical decoding (Andres Freund)
Fix incorrect replay of WAL parameter change records that report changes in the wal_log_hints setting (Petr Jelinek)
Change "pgstat wait timeout" warning message to be LOG level, and rephrase it to be more understandable (Tom Lane)
This message was originally thought to be essentially a can't-happen case, but it occurs often enough on our slower buildfarm members to be a nuisance. Reduce it to LOG level, and expend a bit more effort on the wording: it now reads "using stale statistics instead of current ones because stats collector is not responding".
Warn if macOS's setlocale() starts an unwanted extra thread inside the postmaster (Noah Misch)
Fix libpq's behavior when /etc/passwd isn't readable (Tom Lane)
While doing PQsetdbLogin(), libpq attempts to ascertain the user's operating system name, which on most Unix platforms involves reading /etc/passwd. As of 9.4, failure to do that was treated as a hard error. Restore the previous behavior, which was to fail only if the application does not provide a database role name to connect as. This supports operation in chroot environments that lack an /etc/passwd file.
Improve consistency of parsing of psql's special variables (Tom Lane)
Allow variant spellings of on and off (such as 1/0) for ECHO_HIDDEN and ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK. Report a warning for unrecognized values for COMP_KEYWORD_CASE, ECHO, ECHO_HIDDEN, HISTCONTROL, ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK, and VERBOSITY. Recognize all values for all these variables case-insensitively; previously there was a mishmash of case-sensitive and case-insensitive behaviors.
Fix pg_dump to handle comments on event triggers without failing (Tom Lane)
Allow parallel pg_dump to use --serializable-deferrable (Kevin Grittner)
Prevent WAL files created by pg_basebackup -x/-X from being archived again when the standby is promoted (Andres Freund)
Handle unexpected query results, especially NULLs, safely in contrib/tablefunc's connectby() (Michael Paquier)
connectby() previously crashed if it encountered a NULL key value. It now prints that row but doesn't recurse further.
Numerous cleanups of warnings from Coverity static code analyzer (Andres Freund, Tatsuo Ishii, Marko Kreen, Tom Lane, Michael Paquier)
These changes are mostly cosmetic but in some cases fix corner-case bugs, for example a crash rather than a proper error report after an out-of-memory failure. None are believed to represent security issues.
Allow CFLAGS from configure's environment to override automatically-supplied CFLAGS (Tom Lane)
Previously, configure would add any switches that it chose of its own accord to the end of the user-specified CFLAGS string. Since most compilers process switches left-to-right, this meant that configure's choices would override the user-specified flags in case of conflicts. That should work the other way around, so adjust the logic to put the user's string at the end not the beginning.
Make pg_regress remove any temporary installation it created upon successful exit (Tom Lane)
This results in a very substantial reduction in disk space usage during make check-world, since that sequence involves creation of numerous temporary installations.
Add CST (China Standard Time) to our lists of timezone abbreviations (Tom Lane)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2015a for DST law changes in Chile and Mexico, plus historical changes in Iceland.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.4.2 released on 2015-05-22 - docs
Avoid possible crash when client disconnects just before the authentication timeout expires (Benkocs Norbert Attila)
If the timeout interrupt fired partway through the session shutdown sequence, SSL-related state would be freed twice, typically causing a crash and hence denial of service to other sessions. Experimentation shows that an unauthenticated remote attacker could trigger the bug somewhat consistently, hence treat as security issue. (CVE-2015-3165)
Improve detection of system-call failures (Noah Misch)
Our replacement implementation of snprintf() failed to check for errors reported by the underlying system library calls; the main case that might be missed is out-of-memory situations. In the worst case this might lead to information exposure, due to our code assuming that a buffer had been overwritten when it hadn't been. Also, there were a few places in which security-relevant calls of other system library functions did not check for failure.
It remains possible that some calls of the *printf() family of functions are vulnerable to information disclosure if an out-of-memory error occurs at just the wrong time. We judge the risk to not be large, but will continue analysis in this area. (CVE-2015-3166)
In contrib/pgcrypto, uniformly report decryption failures as "Wrong key or corrupt data" (Noah Misch)
Previously, some cases of decryption with an incorrect key could report other error message texts. It has been shown that such variance in error reports can aid attackers in recovering keys from other systems. While it's unknown whether pgcrypto's specific behaviors are likewise exploitable, it seems better to avoid the risk by using a one-size-fits-all message. (CVE-2015-3167)
Protect against wraparound of multixact member IDs (Álvaro Herrera, Robert Haas, Thomas Munro)
Under certain usage patterns, the existing defenses against this might be insufficient, allowing pg_multixact/members files to be removed too early, resulting in data loss. The fix for this includes modifying the server to fail transactions that would result in overwriting old multixact member ID data, and improving autovacuum to ensure it will act proactively to prevent multixact member ID wraparound, as it does for transaction ID wraparound.
Fix incorrect declaration of contrib/citext's regexp_matches() functions (Tom Lane)
These functions should return setof text[], like the core functions they are wrappers for; but they were incorrectly declared as returning just text[]. This mistake had two results: first, if there was no match you got a scalar null result, whereas what you should get is an empty set (zero rows). Second, the g flag was effectively ignored, since you would get only one result array even if there were multiple matches.
While the latter behavior is clearly a bug, there might be applications depending on the former behavior; therefore the function declarations will not be changed by default until PostgreSQL 9.5. In pre-9.5 branches, the old behavior exists in version 1.0 of the citext extension, while we have provided corrected declarations in version 1.1 (which is not installed by default). To adopt the fix in pre-9.5 branches, execute ALTER EXTENSION citext UPDATE TO '1.1' in each database in which citext is installed. (You can also "update" back to 1.0 if you need to undo that.) Be aware that either update direction will require dropping and recreating any views or rules that use citext's regexp_matches() functions.
Render infinite dates and timestamps as infinity when converting to json, rather than throwing an error (Andrew Dunstan)
Fix json/jsonb's populate_record() and to_record() functions to handle empty input properly (Andrew Dunstan)
Fix incorrect checking of deferred exclusion constraints after a HOT update (Tom Lane)
If a new row that potentially violates a deferred exclusion constraint is HOT-updated (that is, no indexed columns change and the row can be stored back onto the same table page) later in the same transaction, the exclusion constraint would be reported as violated when the check finally occurred, even if the row(s) the new row originally conflicted with had been deleted.
Fix behavior when changing foreign key constraint deferrability status with ALTER TABLE ... ALTER CONSTRAINT (Tom Lane)
Operations later in the same session or concurrent sessions might not honor the status change promptly.
Fix planning of star-schema-style queries (Tom Lane)
Sometimes, efficient scanning of a large table requires that index parameters be provided from more than one other table (commonly, dimension tables whose keys are needed to index a large fact table). The planner should be able to find such plans, but an overly restrictive search heuristic prevented it.
Prevent improper reordering of antijoins (NOT EXISTS joins) versus other outer joins (Tom Lane)
This oversight in the planner has been observed to cause "could not find RelOptInfo for given relids" errors, but it seems possible that sometimes an incorrect query plan might get past that consistency check and result in silently-wrong query output.
Fix incorrect matching of subexpressions in outer-join plan nodes (Tom Lane)
Previously, if textually identical non-strict subexpressions were used both above and below an outer join, the planner might try to re-use the value computed below the join, which would be incorrect because the executor would force the value to NULL in case of an unmatched outer row.
Fix GEQO planner to cope with failure of its join order heuristic (Tom Lane)
This oversight has been seen to lead to "failed to join all relations together" errors in queries involving LATERAL, and that might happen in other cases as well.
Ensure that row locking occurs properly when the target of an UPDATE or DELETE is a security-barrier view (Stephen Frost)
Use a file opened for read/write when syncing replication slot data during database startup (Andres Freund)
On some platforms, the previous coding could result in errors like "could not fsync file "pg_replslot/...": Bad file descriptor".
Fix possible deadlock at startup when max_prepared_transactions is too small (Heikki Linnakangas)
Don't archive useless preallocated WAL files after a timeline switch (Heikki Linnakangas)
Recursively fsync() the data directory after a crash (Abhijit Menon-Sen, Robert Haas)
This ensures consistency if another crash occurs shortly later. (The second crash would have to be a system-level crash, not just a database crash, for there to be a problem.)
Fix autovacuum launcher's possible failure to shut down, if an error occurs after it receives SIGTERM (Álvaro Herrera)
Fix failure to handle invalidation messages for system catalogs early in session startup (Tom Lane)
This oversight could result in failures in sessions that start concurrently with a VACUUM FULL on a system catalog.
Fix crash in BackendIdGetTransactionIds() when trying to get status for a backend process that just exited (Tom Lane)
Cope with unexpected signals in LockBufferForCleanup() (Andres Freund)
This oversight could result in spurious errors about "multiple backends attempting to wait for pincount 1".
Fix crash when doing COPY IN to a table with check constraints that contain whole-row references (Tom Lane)
The known failure case only crashes in 9.4 and up, but there is very similar code in 9.3 and 9.2, so back-patch those branches as well.
Avoid waiting for WAL flush or synchronous replication during commit of a transaction that was read-only so far as the user is concerned (Andres Freund)
Previously, a delay could occur at commit in transactions that had written WAL due to HOT page pruning, leading to undesirable effects such as sessions getting stuck at startup if all synchronous replicas are down. Sessions have also been observed to get stuck in catchup interrupt processing when using synchronous replication; this will fix that problem as well.
Avoid busy-waiting with short recovery_min_apply_delay values (Andres Freund)
Fix crash when manipulating hash indexes on temporary tables (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix possible failure during hash index bucket split, if other processes are modifying the index concurrently (Tom Lane)
Fix memory leaks in GIN index vacuum (Heikki Linnakangas)
Check for interrupts while analyzing index expressions (Jeff Janes)
ANALYZE executes index expressions many times; if there are slow functions in such an expression, it's desirable to be able to cancel the ANALYZE before that loop finishes.
Ensure tableoid of a foreign table is reported correctly when a READ COMMITTED recheck occurs after locking rows in SELECT FOR UPDATE, UPDATE, or DELETE (Etsuro Fujita)
Add the name of the target server to object description strings for foreign-server user mappings (Álvaro Herrera)
Include the schema name in object identity strings for conversions (Álvaro Herrera)
Recommend setting include_realm to 1 when using Kerberos/GSSAPI/SSPI authentication (Stephen Frost)
Without this, identically-named users from different realms cannot be distinguished. For the moment this is only a documentation change, but it will become the default setting in PostgreSQL 9.5.
Remove code for matching IPv4 pg_hba.conf entries to IPv4-in-IPv6 addresses (Tom Lane)
This hack was added in 2003 in response to a report that some Linux kernels of the time would report IPv4 connections as having IPv4-in-IPv6 addresses. However, the logic was accidentally broken in 9.0. The lack of any field complaints since then shows that it's not needed anymore. Now we have reports that the broken code causes crashes on some systems, so let's just remove it rather than fix it. (Had we chosen to fix it, that would make for a subtle and potentially security-sensitive change in the effective meaning of IPv4 pg_hba.conf entries, which does not seem like a good thing to do in minor releases.)
Fix status reporting for terminated background workers that were never actually started (Robert Haas)
After a database crash, don't restart background workers that are marked BGW_NEVER_RESTART (Amit Khandekar)
Report WAL flush, not insert, position in IDENTIFY_SYSTEM replication command (Heikki Linnakangas)
This avoids a possible startup failure in pg_receivexlog.
While shutting down service on Windows, periodically send status updates to the Service Control Manager to prevent it from killing the service too soon; and ensure that pg_ctl will wait for shutdown (Krystian Bigaj)
Reduce risk of network deadlock when using libpq's non-blocking mode (Heikki Linnakangas)
When sending large volumes of data, it's important to drain the input buffer every so often, in case the server has sent enough response data to cause it to block on output. (A typical scenario is that the server is sending a stream of NOTICE messages during COPY FROM STDIN.) This worked properly in the normal blocking mode, but not so much in non-blocking mode. We've modified libpq to opportunistically drain input when it can, but a full defense against this problem requires application cooperation: the application should watch for socket read-ready as well as write-ready conditions, and be sure to call PQconsumeInput() upon read-ready.
In libpq, fix misparsing of empty values in URI connection strings (Thomas Fanghaenel)
Fix array handling in ecpg (Michael Meskes)
Fix psql to sanely handle URIs and conninfo strings as the first parameter to \connect (David Fetter, Andrew Dunstan, Álvaro Herrera)
This syntax has been accepted (but undocumented) for a long time, but previously some parameters might be taken from the old connection instead of the given string, which was agreed to be undesirable.
Suppress incorrect complaints from psql on some platforms that it failed to write ~/.psql_history at exit (Tom Lane)
This misbehavior was caused by a workaround for a bug in very old (pre-2006) versions of libedit. We fixed it by removing the workaround, which will cause a similar failure to appear for anyone still using such versions of libedit. Recommendation: upgrade that library, or use libreadline.
Fix pg_dump's rule for deciding which casts are system-provided casts that should not be dumped (Tom Lane)
In pg_dump, fix failure to honor -Z compression level option together with -Fd (Michael Paquier)
Make pg_dump consider foreign key relationships between extension configuration tables while choosing dump order (Gilles Darold, Michael Paquier, Stephen Frost)
This oversight could result in producing dumps that fail to reload because foreign key constraints are transiently violated.
Avoid possible pg_dump failure when concurrent sessions are creating and dropping temporary functions (Tom Lane)
Fix dumping of views that are just VALUES(...) but have column aliases (Tom Lane)
Ensure that a view's replication identity is correctly set to nothing during dump/restore (Marko Tiikkaja)
Previously, if the view was involved in a circular dependency, it might wind up with an incorrect replication identity property.
In pg_upgrade, force timeline 1 in the new cluster (Bruce Momjian)
This change prevents upgrade failures caused by bogus complaints about missing WAL history files.
In pg_upgrade, check for improperly non-connectable databases before proceeding (Bruce Momjian)
In pg_upgrade, quote directory paths properly in the generated delete_old_cluster script (Bruce Momjian)
In pg_upgrade, preserve database-level freezing info properly (Bruce Momjian)
This oversight could cause missing-clog-file errors for tables within the postgres and template1 databases.
Run pg_upgrade and pg_resetxlog with restricted privileges on Windows, so that they don't fail when run by an administrator (Muhammad Asif Naeem)
Improve handling of readdir() failures when scanning directories in initdb and pg_basebackup (Marco Nenciarini)
Fix slow sorting algorithm in contrib/intarray (Tom Lane)
Fix compile failure on Sparc V8 machines (Rob Rowan)
Silence some build warnings on macOS (Tom Lane)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2015d for DST law changes in Egypt, Mongolia, and Palestine, plus historical changes in Canada and Chile. Also adopt revised zone abbreviations for the America/Adak zone (HST/HDT not HAST/HADT).
⇑ Upgrade to 9.4.3 released on 2015-06-04 - docs
Avoid failures while fsync'ing data directory during crash restart (Abhijit Menon-Sen, Tom Lane)
In the previous minor releases we added a patch to fsync everything in the data directory after a crash. Unfortunately its response to any error condition was to fail, thereby preventing the server from starting up, even when the problem was quite harmless. An example is that an unwritable file in the data directory would prevent restart on some platforms; but it is common to make SSL certificate files unwritable by the server. Revise this behavior so that permissions failures are ignored altogether, and other types of failures are logged but do not prevent continuing.
Also apply the same rules in initdb --sync-only. This case is less critical but it should act similarly.
Fix pg_get_functiondef() to show functions' LEAKPROOF property, if set (Jeevan Chalke)
Fix pushJsonbValue() to unpack jbvBinary objects (Andrew Dunstan)
This change does not affect any behavior in the core code as of 9.4, but it avoids a corner case for possible third-party callers.
Remove configure's check prohibiting linking to a threaded libpython on OpenBSD (Tom Lane)
The failure this restriction was meant to prevent seems to not be a problem anymore on current OpenBSD versions.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.4.4 released on 2015-06-12 - docs
Fix possible failure to recover from an inconsistent database state (Robert Haas)
Recent PostgreSQL releases introduced mechanisms to protect against multixact wraparound, but some of that code did not account for the possibility that it would need to run during crash recovery, when the database may not be in a consistent state. This could result in failure to restart after a crash, or failure to start up a secondary server. The lingering effects of a previously-fixed bug in pg_upgrade could also cause such a failure, in installations that had used pg_upgrade versions between 9.3.0 and 9.3.4.
The pg_upgrade bug in question was that it would set oldestMultiXid to 1 in pg_control even if the true value should be higher. With the fixes introduced in this release, such a situation will result in immediate emergency autovacuuming until a correct oldestMultiXid value can be determined. If that would pose a hardship, users can avoid it by doing manual vacuuming before upgrading to this release. In detail:
Check whether pg_controldata reports "Latest checkpoint's oldestMultiXid" to be 1. If not, there's nothing to do.
Look in PGDATA/pg_multixact/offsets to see if there's a file named 0000. If there is, there's nothing to do.
Otherwise, for each table that has pg_class.relminmxid equal to 1, VACUUM that table with both vacuum_multixact_freeze_min_age and vacuum_multixact_freeze_table_age set to zero. (You can use the vacuum cost delay parameters described in Section 18.4.4 to reduce the performance consequences for concurrent sessions.)
Fix rare failure to invalidate relation cache init file (Tom Lane)
With just the wrong timing of concurrent activity, a VACUUM FULL on a system catalog might fail to update the "init file" that's used to avoid cache-loading work for new sessions. This would result in later sessions being unable to access that catalog at all. This is a very ancient bug, but it's so hard to trigger that no reproducible case had been seen until recently.
Avoid deadlock between incoming sessions and CREATE/DROP DATABASE (Tom Lane)
A new session starting in a database that is the target of a DROP DATABASE command, or is the template for a CREATE DATABASE command, could cause the command to wait for five seconds and then fail, even if the new session would have exited before that.
Improve planner's cost estimates for semi-joins and anti-joins with inner indexscans (Tom Lane, Tomas Vondra)
This type of plan is quite cheap when all the join clauses are used as index scan conditions, even if the inner scan would nominally fetch many rows, because the executor will stop after obtaining one row. The planner only partially accounted for that effect, and would therefore overestimate the cost, leading it to possibly choose some other much less efficient plan type.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.4.5 released on 2015-10-08 - docs
Guard against stack overflows in json parsing (Oskari Saarenmaa)
If an application constructs PostgreSQL json or jsonb values from arbitrary user input, the application's users can reliably crash the PostgreSQL server, causing momentary denial of service. (CVE-2015-5289)
Fix contrib/pgcrypto to detect and report too-short crypt() salts (Josh Kupershmidt)
Certain invalid salt arguments crashed the server or disclosed a few bytes of server memory. We have not ruled out the viability of attacks that arrange for presence of confidential information in the disclosed bytes, but they seem unlikely. (CVE-2015-5288)
Fix subtransaction cleanup after a portal (cursor) belonging to an outer subtransaction fails (Tom Lane, Michael Paquier)
A function executed in an outer-subtransaction cursor could cause an assertion failure or crash by referencing a relation created within an inner subtransaction.
Fix possible deadlock during WAL insertion when commit_delay is set (Heikki Linnakangas)
Ensure all relations referred to by an updatable view are properly locked during an update statement (Dean Rasheed)
Fix insertion of relations into the relation cache "init file" (Tom Lane)
An oversight in a patch in the most recent minor releases caused pg_trigger_tgrelid_tgname_index to be omitted from the init file. Subsequent sessions detected this, then deemed the init file to be broken and silently ignored it, resulting in a significant degradation in session startup time. In addition to fixing the bug, install some guards so that any similar future mistake will be more obvious.
Avoid O(N^2) behavior when inserting many tuples into a SPI query result (Neil Conway)
Improve LISTEN startup time when there are many unread notifications (Matt Newell)
Fix performance problem when a session alters large numbers of foreign key constraints (Jan Wieck, Tom Lane)
This was seen primarily when restoring pg_dump output for databases with many thousands of tables.
Disable SSL renegotiation by default (Michael Paquier, Andres Freund)
While use of SSL renegotiation is a good idea in theory, we have seen too many bugs in practice, both in the underlying OpenSSL library and in our usage of it. Renegotiation will be removed entirely in 9.5 and later. In the older branches, just change the default value of ssl_renegotiation_limit to zero (disabled).
Lower the minimum values of the *_freeze_max_age parameters (Andres Freund)
This is mainly to make tests of related behavior less time-consuming, but it may also be of value for installations with limited disk space.
Limit the maximum value of wal_buffers to 2GB to avoid server crashes (Josh Berkus)
Avoid logging complaints when a parameter that can only be set at server start appears multiple times in postgresql.conf, and fix counting of line numbers after an include_dir directive (Tom Lane)
Fix rare internal overflow in multiplication of numeric values (Dean Rasheed)
Guard against hard-to-reach stack overflows involving record types, range types, json, jsonb, tsquery, ltxtquery and query_int (Noah Misch)
Fix handling of DOW and DOY in datetime input (Greg Stark)
These tokens aren't meant to be used in datetime values, but previously they resulted in opaque internal error messages rather than "invalid input syntax".
Add more query-cancel checks to regular expression matching (Tom Lane)
Add recursion depth protections to regular expression, SIMILAR TO, and LIKE matching (Tom Lane)
Suitable search patterns and a low stack depth limit could lead to stack-overrun crashes.
Fix potential infinite loop in regular expression execution (Tom Lane)
A search pattern that can apparently match a zero-length string, but actually doesn't match because of a back reference, could lead to an infinite loop.
In regular expression execution, correctly record match data for capturing parentheses within a quantifier even when the match is zero-length (Tom Lane)
Fix low-memory failures in regular expression compilation (Andreas Seltenreich)
Fix low-probability memory leak during regular expression execution (Tom Lane)
Fix rare low-memory failure in lock cleanup during transaction abort (Tom Lane)
Fix "unexpected out-of-memory situation during sort" errors when using tuplestores with small work_mem settings (Tom Lane)
Fix very-low-probability stack overrun in qsort (Tom Lane)
Fix "invalid memory alloc request size" failure in hash joins with large work_mem settings (Tomas Vondra, Tom Lane)
Fix assorted planner bugs (Tom Lane)
These mistakes could lead to incorrect query plans that would give wrong answers, or to assertion failures in assert-enabled builds, or to odd planner errors such as "could not devise a query plan for the given query", "could not find pathkey item to sort", "plan should not reference subplan's variable", or "failed to assign all NestLoopParams to plan nodes". Thanks are due to Andreas Seltenreich and Piotr Stefaniak for fuzz testing that exposed these problems.
Improve planner's performance for UPDATE/DELETE on large inheritance sets (Tom Lane, Dean Rasheed)
Ensure standby promotion trigger files are removed at postmaster startup (Michael Paquier, Fujii Masao)
This prevents unwanted promotion from occurring if these files appear in a database backup that is used to initialize a new standby server.
During postmaster shutdown, ensure that per-socket lock files are removed and listen sockets are closed before we remove the postmaster.pid file (Tom Lane)
This avoids race-condition failures if an external script attempts to start a new postmaster as soon as pg_ctl stop returns.
Ensure that the postmaster does not exit until all its child processes are gone, even in an immediate shutdown (Tom Lane)
Like the previous item, this avoids possible race conditions against a subsequently-started postmaster.
Fix postmaster's handling of a startup-process crash during crash recovery (Tom Lane)
If, during a crash recovery cycle, the startup process crashes without having restored database consistency, we'd try to launch a new startup process, which typically would just crash again, leading to an infinite loop.
Make emergency autovacuuming for multixact wraparound more robust (Andres Freund)
Do not print a WARNING when an autovacuum worker is already gone when we attempt to signal it, and reduce log verbosity for such signals (Tom Lane)
Prevent autovacuum launcher from sleeping unduly long if the server clock is moved backwards a large amount (Álvaro Herrera)
Ensure that cleanup of a GIN index's pending-insertions list is interruptable by cancel requests (Jeff Janes)
Allow all-zeroes pages in GIN indexes to be reused (Heikki Linnakangas)
Such a page might be left behind after a crash.
Fix handling of all-zeroes pages in SP-GiST indexes (Heikki Linnakangas)
VACUUM attempted to recycle such pages, but did so in a way that wasn't crash-safe.
Fix off-by-one error that led to otherwise-harmless warnings about "apparent wraparound" in subtrans/multixact truncation (Thomas Munro)
Fix misreporting of CONTINUE and MOVE statement types in PL/pgSQL's error context messages (Pavel Stehule, Tom Lane)
Fix PL/Perl to handle non-ASCII error message texts correctly (Alex Hunsaker)
Fix PL/Python crash when returning the string representation of a record result (Tom Lane)
Fix some places in PL/Tcl that neglected to check for failure of malloc() calls (Michael Paquier, Álvaro Herrera)
In contrib/isn, fix output of ISBN-13 numbers that begin with 979 (Fabien Coelho)
EANs beginning with 979 (but not 9790) are considered ISBNs, but they must be printed in the new 13-digit format, not the 10-digit format.
Improve contrib/pg_stat_statements' handling of query-text garbage collection (Peter Geoghegan)
The external file containing query texts could bloat to very large sizes; once it got past 1GB attempts to trim it would fail, soon leading to situations where the file could not be read at all.
Improve contrib/postgres_fdw's handling of collation-related decisions (Tom Lane)
The main user-visible effect is expected to be that comparisons involving varchar columns will be sent to the remote server for execution in more cases than before.
Improve libpq's handling of out-of-memory conditions (Michael Paquier, Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix memory leaks and missing out-of-memory checks in ecpg (Michael Paquier)
Fix psql's code for locale-aware formatting of numeric output (Tom Lane)
The formatting code invoked by \pset numericlocale on did the wrong thing for some uncommon cases such as numbers with an exponent but no decimal point. It could also mangle already-localized output from the money data type.
Prevent crash in psql's \c command when there is no current connection (Noah Misch)
Make pg_dump handle inherited NOT VALID check constraints correctly (Tom Lane)
Fix selection of default zlib compression level in pg_dump's directory output format (Andrew Dunstan)
Ensure that temporary files created during a pg_dump run with tar-format output are not world-readable (Michael Paquier)
Fix pg_dump and pg_upgrade to support cases where the postgres or template1 database is in a non-default tablespace (Marti Raudsepp, Bruce Momjian)
Fix pg_dump to handle object privileges sanely when dumping from a server too old to have a particular privilege type (Tom Lane)
When dumping data types from pre-9.2 servers, and when dumping functions or procedural languages from pre-7.3 servers, pg_dump would produce GRANT/REVOKE commands that revoked the owner's grantable privileges and instead granted all privileges to PUBLIC. Since the privileges involved are just USAGE and EXECUTE, this isn't a security problem, but it's certainly a surprising representation of the older systems' behavior. Fix it to leave the default privilege state alone in these cases.
Fix pg_dump to dump shell types (Tom Lane)
Shell types (that is, not-yet-fully-defined types) aren't useful for much, but nonetheless pg_dump should dump them.
Fix assorted minor memory leaks in pg_dump and other client-side programs (Michael Paquier)
Fix pgbench's progress-report behavior when a query, or pgbench itself, gets stuck (Fabien Coelho)
Fix spinlock assembly code for Alpha hardware (Tom Lane)
Fix spinlock assembly code for PPC hardware to be compatible with AIX's native assembler (Tom Lane)
Building with gcc didn't work if gcc had been configured to use the native assembler, which is becoming more common.
On AIX, test the -qlonglong compiler option rather than just assuming it's safe to use (Noah Misch)
On AIX, use -Wl,-brtllib link option to allow symbols to be resolved at runtime (Noah Misch)
Perl relies on this ability in 5.8.0 and later.
Avoid use of inline functions when compiling with 32-bit xlc, due to compiler bugs (Noah Misch)
Use librt for sched_yield() when necessary, which it is on some Solaris versions (Oskari Saarenmaa)
Translate encoding UHC as Windows code page 949 (Noah Misch)
This fixes presentation of non-ASCII log messages from processes that are not attached to any particular database, such as the postmaster.
On Windows, avoid failure when doing encoding conversion to UTF16 outside a transaction, such as for log messages (Noah Misch)
Fix postmaster startup failure due to not copying setlocale()'s return value (Noah Misch)
This has been reported on Windows systems with the ANSI code page set to CP936 ("Chinese (Simplified, PRC)"), and may occur with other multibyte code pages.
Fix Windows install.bat script to handle target directory names that contain spaces (Heikki Linnakangas)
Make the numeric form of the PostgreSQL version number (e.g., 90405) readily available to extension Makefiles, as a variable named VERSION_NUM (Michael Paquier)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2015g for DST law changes in Cayman Islands, Fiji, Moldova, Morocco, Norfolk Island, North Korea, Turkey, and Uruguay. There is a new zone name America/Fort_Nelson for the Canadian Northern Rockies.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.5 released on 2016-01-07 - docs
Adjust operator precedence to match the SQL standard (Tom Lane)
The precedence of <=, >= and <> has been reduced to match that of <, > and =. The precedence of IS tests (e.g., x IS NULL) has been reduced to be just below these six comparison operators. Also, multi-keyword operators beginning with NOT now have the precedence of their base operator (for example, NOT BETWEEN now has the same precedence as BETWEEN) whereas before they had inconsistent precedence, behaving like NOT with respect to their left operand but like their base operator with respect to their right operand. The new configuration parameter operator_precedence_warning can be enabled to warn about queries in which these precedence changes result in different parsing choices.
Change pg_ctl's default shutdown mode from smart to fast (Bruce Momjian)
This means the default behavior will be to forcibly cancel existing database sessions, not simply wait for them to exit.
Use assignment cast behavior for data type conversions in PL/pgSQL assignments, rather than converting to and from text (Tom Lane)
This change causes conversions of Booleans to strings to produce true or false, not t or f. Other type conversions may succeed in more cases than before; for example, assigning a numeric value 3.9 to an integer variable will now assign 4 rather than failing. If no assignment-grade cast is defined for the particular source and destination types, PL/pgSQL will fall back to its old I/O conversion behavior.
Allow characters in server command-line options to be escaped with a backslash (Andres Freund)
Formerly, spaces in the options string always separated options, so there was no way to include a space in an option value. Including a backslash in an option value now requires writing \\.
Change the default value of the GSSAPI include_realm parameter to 1, so that by default the realm is not removed from a GSS or SSPI principal name (Stephen Frost)
Replace configuration parameter checkpoint_segments with min_wal_size and max_wal_size (Heikki Linnakangas)
If you previously adjusted checkpoint_segments, the following formula will give you an approximately equivalent setting:
max_wal_size = (3 * checkpoint_segments) * 16MB
Note that the default setting for max_wal_size is much higher than the default checkpoint_segments used to be, so adjusting it might no longer be necessary.
Control the Linux OOM killer via new environment variables PG_OOM_ADJUST_FILE and PG_OOM_ADJUST_VALUE, instead of compile-time options LINUX_OOM_SCORE_ADJ and LINUX_OOM_ADJ (Gurjeet Singh)
Decommission server configuration parameter ssl_renegotiation_limit, which was deprecated in earlier releases (Andres Freund)
While SSL renegotiation is a good idea in theory, it has caused enough bugs to be considered a net negative in practice, and it is due to be removed from future versions of the relevant standards. We have therefore removed support for it from PostgreSQL. The ssl_renegotiation_limit parameter still exists, but cannot be set to anything but zero (disabled). It's not documented anymore, either.
Remove server configuration parameter autocommit, which was already deprecated and non-operational (Tom Lane)
Remove the pg_authid catalog's rolcatupdate field, as it had no usefulness (Adam Brightwell)
The pg_stat_replication system view's sent field is now NULL, not zero, when it has no valid value (Magnus Hagander)
Allow json and jsonb array extraction operators to accept negative subscripts, which count from the end of JSON arrays (Peter Geoghegan, Andrew Dunstan)
Previously, these operators returned NULL for negative subscripts.
Add Block Range Indexes (BRIN) (Álvaro Herrera)
BRIN indexes store only summary data (such as minimum and maximum values) for ranges of heap blocks. They are therefore very compact and cheap to update; but if the data is naturally clustered, they can still provide substantial speedup of searches.
Allow queries to perform accurate distance filtering of bounding-box-indexed objects (polygons, circles) using GiST indexes (Alexander Korotkov, Heikki Linnakangas)
Previously, to exploit such an index a subquery had to be used to select a large number of rows ordered by bounding-box distance, and the result then had to be filtered further with a more accurate distance calculation.
Allow GiST indexes to perform index-only scans (Anastasia Lubennikova, Heikki Linnakangas, Andreas Karlsson)
Add configuration parameter gin_pending_list_limit to control the size of GIN pending lists (Fujii Masao)
This value can also be set on a per-index basis as an index storage parameter. Previously the pending-list size was controlled by work_mem, which was awkward because appropriate values for work_mem are often much too large for this purpose.
Issue a warning during the creation of hash indexes because they are not crash-safe (Bruce Momjian)
Improve the speed of sorting of varchar, text, and numeric fields via "abbreviated" keys (Peter Geoghegan, Andrew Gierth, Robert Haas)
Extend the infrastructure that allows sorting to be performed by inlined, non-SQL-callable comparison functions to cover CREATE INDEX, REINDEX, and CLUSTER (Peter Geoghegan)
Improve performance of hash joins (Tomas Vondra, Robert Haas)
Improve concurrency of shared buffer replacement (Robert Haas, Amit Kapila, Andres Freund)
Reduce the number of page locks and pins during index scans (Kevin Grittner)
The primary benefit of this is to allow index vacuums to be blocked less often.
Make per-backend tracking of buffer pins more memory-efficient (Andres Freund)
Improve lock scalability (Andres Freund)
This particularly addresses scalability problems when running on systems with multiple CPU sockets.
Allow the optimizer to remove unnecessary references to left-joined subqueries (David Rowley)
Allow pushdown of query restrictions into subqueries with window functions, where appropriate (David Rowley)
Allow a non-leakproof function to be pushed down into a security barrier view if the function does not receive any view output columns (Dean Rasheed)
Teach the planner to use statistics obtained from an expression index on a boolean-returning function, when a matching function call appears in WHERE (Tom Lane)
Make ANALYZE compute basic statistics (null fraction and average column width) even for columns whose data type lacks an equality function (Oleksandr Shulgin)
Speed up CRC (cyclic redundancy check) computations and switch to CRC-32C (Abhijit Menon-Sen, Heikki Linnakangas)
Improve bitmap index scan performance (Teodor Sigaev, Tom Lane)
Speed up CREATE INDEX by avoiding unnecessary memory copies (Robert Haas)
Increase the number of buffer mapping partitions (Amit Kapila, Andres Freund, Robert Haas)
This improves performance for highly concurrent workloads.
Add per-table autovacuum logging control via new log_autovacuum_min_duration storage parameter (Michael Paquier)
Add new configuration parameter cluster_name (Thomas Munro)
This string, typically set in postgresql.conf, allows clients to identify the cluster. This name also appears in the process title of all server processes, allowing for easier identification of processes belonging to the same cluster.
Prevent non-superusers from changing log_disconnections on connection startup (Fujii Masao)
Check "Subject Alternative Names" in SSL server certificates, if present (Alexey Klyukin)
When they are present, this replaces checks against the certificate's "Common Name".
Add system view pg_stat_ssl to report SSL connection information (Magnus Hagander)
Add libpq functions to return SSL information in an implementation-independent way (Heikki Linnakangas)
While PQgetssl() can still be used to call OpenSSL functions, it is now considered deprecated because future versions of libpq might support other SSL implementations. When possible, use the new functions PQsslAttribute(), PQsslAttributeNames(), and PQsslInUse() to obtain SSL information in an SSL-implementation-independent way.
Make libpq honor any OpenSSL thread callbacks (Jan Urbanski)
Previously they were overwritten.
Replace configuration parameter checkpoint_segments with min_wal_size and max_wal_size (Heikki Linnakangas)
This change allows the allocation of a large number of WAL files without keeping them after they are no longer needed. Therefore the default for max_wal_size has been set to 1GB, much larger than the old default for checkpoint_segments. Also note that standby servers perform restartpoints to try to limit their WAL space consumption to max_wal_size; previously they did not pay any attention to checkpoint_segments.
Control the Linux OOM killer via new environment variables PG_OOM_ADJUST_FILE and PG_OOM_ADJUST_VALUE (Gurjeet Singh)
The previous OOM control infrastructure involved compile-time options LINUX_OOM_SCORE_ADJ and LINUX_OOM_ADJ, which are no longer supported. The new behavior is available in all builds.
Allow recording of transaction commit time stamps when configuration parameter track_commit_timestamp is enabled (Álvaro Herrera, Petr Jelínek)
Time stamp information can be accessed using functions pg_xact_commit_timestamp() and pg_last_committed_xact().
Allow local_preload_libraries to be set by ALTER ROLE SET (Peter Eisentraut, Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Allow autovacuum workers to respond to configuration parameter changes during a run (Michael Paquier)
Make configuration parameter debug_assertions read-only (Andres Freund)
This means that assertions can no longer be turned off if they were enabled at compile time, allowing for more efficient code optimization. This change also removes the postgres -A option.
Allow setting effective_io_concurrency on systems where it has no effect (Peter Eisentraut)
Add system view pg_file_settings to show the contents of the server's configuration files (Sawada Masahiko)
Add pending_restart to the system view pg_settings to indicate a change has been made but will not take effect until a database restart (Peter Eisentraut)
Allow ALTER SYSTEM values to be reset with ALTER SYSTEM RESET (Vik Fearing)
This command removes the specified setting from postgresql.auto.conf.
Create mechanisms for tracking the progress of replication, including methods for identifying the origin of individual changes during logical replication (Andres Freund)
This is helpful when implementing replication solutions.
Rework truncation of the multixact commit log to be properly WAL-logged (Andres Freund)
This makes things substantially simpler and more robust.
Add recovery.conf parameter recovery_target_action to control post-recovery activity (Petr Jelínek)
This replaces the old parameter pause_at_recovery_target.
Add new archive_mode value always to allow standbys to always archive received WAL files (Fujii Masao)
Add configuration parameter wal_retrieve_retry_interval to control WAL read retry after failure (Alexey Vasiliev, Michael Paquier)
This is particularly helpful for warm standbys.
Allow compression of full-page images stored in WAL (Rahila Syed, Michael Paquier)
This feature reduces WAL volume, at the cost of more CPU time spent on WAL logging and WAL replay. It is controlled by a new configuration parameter wal_compression, which currently is off by default.
Archive WAL files with suffix .partial during standby promotion (Heikki Linnakangas)
Add configuration parameter log_replication_commands to log replication commands (Fujii Masao)
By default, replication commands, e.g. IDENTIFY_SYSTEM, are not logged, even when log_statement is set to all.
Report the processes holding replication slots in pg_replication_slots (Craig Ringer)
The new output column is active_pid.
Allow recovery.conf's primary_conninfo setting to use connection URIs, e.g. postgres:// (Alexander Shulgin)
Allow INSERTs that would generate constraint conflicts to be turned into UPDATEs or ignored (Peter Geoghegan, Heikki Linnakangas, Andres Freund)
The syntax is INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING/UPDATE. This is the Postgres implementation of the popular UPSERT command.
Add GROUP BY analysis features GROUPING SETS, CUBE and ROLLUP (Andrew Gierth, Atri Sharma)
Allow setting multiple target columns in an UPDATE from the result of a single sub-SELECT (Tom Lane)
This is accomplished using the syntax UPDATE tab SET (col1, col2, ...) = (SELECT ...).
Add SELECT option SKIP LOCKED to skip locked rows (Thomas Munro)
This does not throw an error for locked rows like NOWAIT does.
Add SELECT option TABLESAMPLE to return a subset of a table (Petr Jelínek)
This feature supports the SQL-standard table sampling methods. In addition, there are provisions for user-defined table sampling methods.
Suggest possible matches for mistyped column names (Peter Geoghegan, Robert Haas)
Add more details about sort ordering in EXPLAIN output (Marius Timmer, Lukas Kreft, Arne Scheffer)
Details include COLLATE, DESC, USING, and NULLS FIRST/LAST.
Make VACUUM log the number of pages skipped due to pins (Jim Nasby)
Make TRUNCATE properly update the pg_stat* tuple counters (Alexander Shulgin)
Allow REINDEX to reindex an entire schema using the SCHEMA option (Sawada Masahiko)
Add VERBOSE option to REINDEX (Sawada Masahiko)
Prevent REINDEX DATABASE and SCHEMA from outputting object names, unless VERBOSE is used (Simon Riggs)
Remove obsolete FORCE option from REINDEX (Fujii Masao)
Add row-level security control (Craig Ringer, KaiGai Kohei, Adam Brightwell, Dean Rasheed, Stephen Frost)
This feature allows row-by-row control over which users can add, modify, or even see rows in a table. This is controlled by new commands CREATE/ALTER/DROP POLICY and ALTER TABLE ... ENABLE/DISABLE ROW SECURITY.
Allow changing of the WAL logging status of a table after creation with ALTER TABLE ... SET LOGGED / UNLOGGED (Fabrízio de Royes Mello)
Add IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE TABLE AS, CREATE INDEX, CREATE SEQUENCE, and CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW (Fabrízio de Royes Mello)
Add support for IF EXISTS to ALTER TABLE ... RENAME CONSTRAINT (Bruce Momjian)
Allow some DDL commands to accept CURRENT_USER or SESSION_USER, meaning the current user or session user, in place of a specific user name (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Álvaro Herrera)
This feature is now supported in ALTER USER, ALTER GROUP, ALTER ROLE, GRANT, and ALTER object OWNER TO commands.
Support comments on domain constraints (Álvaro Herrera)
Reduce lock levels of some create and alter trigger and foreign key commands (Simon Riggs, Andreas Karlsson)
Allow LOCK TABLE ... ROW EXCLUSIVE MODE for those with INSERT privileges on the target table (Stephen Frost)
Previously this command required UPDATE, DELETE, or TRUNCATE privileges.
Apply table and domain CHECK constraints in order by name (Tom Lane)
The previous ordering was indeterminate.
Allow CREATE/ALTER DATABASE to manipulate datistemplate and datallowconn (Vik Fearing)
This allows these per-database settings to be changed without manually modifying the pg_database system catalog.
Add support for IMPORT FOREIGN SCHEMA (Ronan Dunklau, Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
This command allows automatic creation of local foreign tables that match the structure of existing tables on a remote server.
Allow CHECK constraints to be placed on foreign tables (Shigeru Hanada, Etsuro Fujita)
Such constraints are assumed to be enforced on the remote server, and are not enforced locally. However, they are assumed to hold for purposes of query optimization, such as constraint exclusion.
Allow foreign tables to participate in inheritance (Shigeru Hanada, Etsuro Fujita)
To let this work naturally, foreign tables are now allowed to have check constraints marked as not valid, and to set storage and OID characteristics, even though these operations are effectively no-ops for a foreign table.
Allow foreign data wrappers and custom scans to implement join pushdown (KaiGai Kohei)
Whenever a ddl_command_end event trigger is installed, capture details of DDL activity for it to inspect (Álvaro Herrera)
This information is available through a set-returning function pg_event_trigger_ddl_commands(), or by inspection of C data structures if that function doesn't provide enough detail.
Allow event triggers on table rewrites caused by ALTER TABLE (Dimitri Fontaine)
Add event trigger support for database-level COMMENT, SECURITY LABEL, and GRANT/REVOKE (Álvaro Herrera)
Add columns to the output of pg_event_trigger_dropped_objects (Álvaro Herrera)
This allows simpler processing of delete operations.
Allow the xml data type to accept empty or all-whitespace content values (Peter Eisentraut)
This is required by the SQL/XML specification.
Allow macaddr input using the format xxxx-xxxx-xxxx (Herwin Weststrate)
Disallow non-SQL-standard syntax for interval with both precision and field specifications (Bruce Momjian)
Per the standard, such type specifications should be written as, for example, INTERVAL MINUTE TO SECOND(2). PostgreSQL formerly allowed this to be written as INTERVAL(2) MINUTE TO SECOND, but it must now be written in the standard way.
Add selectivity estimators for inet/cidr operators and improve estimators for text search functions (Emre Hasegeli, Tom Lane)
Add data types regrole and regnamespace to simplify entering and pretty-printing the OID of a role or namespace (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Add jsonb functions jsonb_set() and jsonb_pretty() (Dmitry Dolgov, Andrew Dunstan, Petr Jelínek)
Add jsonb generator functions to_jsonb(), jsonb_object(), jsonb_build_object(), jsonb_build_array(), jsonb_agg(), and jsonb_object_agg() (Andrew Dunstan)
Equivalent functions already existed for type json.
Reduce casting requirements to/from json and jsonb (Tom Lane)
Allow text, text array, and integer values to be subtracted from jsonb documents (Dmitry Dolgov, Andrew Dunstan)
Add jsonb || operator (Dmitry Dolgov, Andrew Dunstan)
Add json_strip_nulls() and jsonb_strip_nulls() functions to remove JSON null values from documents (Andrew Dunstan)
Add generate_series() for numeric values (Plato Malugin)
Allow array_agg() and ARRAY() to take arrays as inputs (Ali Akbar, Tom Lane)
Add functions array_position() and array_positions() to return subscripts of array values (Pavel Stehule)
Add a point-to-polygon distance operator <-> (Alexander Korotkov)
Allow multibyte characters as escapes in SIMILAR TO and SUBSTRING (Jeff Davis)
Previously, only a single-byte character was allowed as an escape.
Add a width_bucket() variant that supports any sortable data type and non-uniform bucket widths (Petr Jelínek)
Add an optional missing_ok argument to pg_read_file() and related functions (Michael Paquier, Heikki Linnakangas)
Allow => to specify named parameters in function calls (Pavel Stehule)
Previously only := could be used. This requires removing the possibility for => to be a user-defined operator. Creation of user-defined => operators has been issuing warnings since PostgreSQL 9.0.
Add POSIX-compliant rounding for platforms that use PostgreSQL-supplied rounding functions (Pedro Gimeno Fortea)
Add function pg_get_object_address() to return OIDs that uniquely identify an object, and function pg_identify_object_as_address() to return object information based on OIDs (Álvaro Herrera)
Loosen security checks for viewing queries in pg_stat_activity, executing pg_cancel_backend(), and executing pg_terminate_backend() (Stephen Frost)
Previously, only the specific role owning the target session could perform these operations; now membership in that role is sufficient.
Add pg_stat_get_snapshot_timestamp() to output the time stamp of the statistics snapshot (Matt Kelly)
This represents the last time the snapshot file was written to the file system.
Add mxid_age() to compute multi-xid age (Bruce Momjian)
Add min()/max() aggregates for inet/cidr data types (Haribabu Kommi)
Use 128-bit integers, where supported, as accumulators for some aggregate functions (Andreas Karlsson)
Improve support for composite types in PL/Python (Ed Behn, Ronan Dunklau)
This allows PL/Python functions to return arrays of composite types.
Reduce lossiness of PL/Python floating-point value conversions (Marko Kreen)
Allow specification of conversion routines between SQL data types and data types of procedural languages (Peter Eisentraut)
This change adds new commands CREATE/DROP TRANSFORM. This also adds optional transformations between the hstore and ltree types to/from PL/Perl and PL/Python.
Improve PL/pgSQL array performance (Tom Lane)
Add an ASSERT statement in PL/pgSQL (Pavel Stehule)
Allow more PL/pgSQL keywords to be used as identifiers (Tom Lane)
Move pg_archivecleanup, pg_test_fsync, pg_test_timing, and pg_xlogdump from contrib to src/bin (Peter Eisentraut)
This should result in these programs being installed by default in most installations.
Add pg_rewind, which allows re-synchronizing a master server after failback (Heikki Linnakangas)
Allow pg_receivexlog to manage physical replication slots (Michael Paquier)
This is controlled via new --create-slot and --drop-slot options.
Allow pg_receivexlog to synchronously flush WAL to storage using new --synchronous option (Furuya Osamu, Fujii Masao)
Without this, WAL files are fsync'ed only on close.
Allow vacuumdb to vacuum in parallel using new --jobs option (Dilip Kumar)
In vacuumdb, do not prompt for the same password repeatedly when multiple connections are necessary (Haribabu Kommi, Michael Paquier)
Add --verbose option to reindexdb (Sawada Masahiko)
Make pg_basebackup use a tablespace mapping file when using tar format, to support symbolic links and file paths of 100+ characters in length on MS Windows (Amit Kapila)
Add pg_xlogdump option --stats to display summary statistics (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
Allow psql to produce AsciiDoc output (Szymon Guz)
Add an errors mode that displays only failed commands to psql's ECHO variable (Pavel Stehule)
This behavior can also be selected with psql's -b option.
Provide separate column, header, and border linestyle control in psql's unicode linestyle (Pavel Stehule)
Single or double lines are supported; the default is single.
Add new option %l in psql's PROMPT variables to display the current multiline statement line number (Sawada Masahiko)
Add \pset option pager_min_lines to control pager invocation (Andrew Dunstan)
Improve psql line counting used when deciding to invoke the pager (Andrew Dunstan)
psql now fails if the file specified by an --output or --log-file switch cannot be written (Tom Lane, Daniel Vérité)
Previously, it effectively ignored the switch in such cases.
Add psql tab completion when setting the search_path variable (Jeff Janes)
Currently only the first schema can be tab-completed.
Improve psql's tab completion for triggers and rules (Andreas Karlsson)
Add psql \? help sections variables and options (Pavel Stehule)
\? variables shows psql's special variables and \? options shows the command-line options. \? commands shows the meta-commands, which is the traditional output and remains the default. These help displays can also be obtained with the command-line option --help=section.
Show tablespace size in psql's \db+ (Fabrízio de Royes Mello)
Show data type owners in psql's \dT+ (Magnus Hagander)
Allow psql's \watch to output \timing information (Fujii Masao)
Also prevent --echo-hidden from echoing \watch queries, since that is generally unwanted.
Make psql's \sf and \ef commands honor ECHO_HIDDEN (Andrew Dunstan)
Improve psql tab completion for \set, \unset, and :variable names (Pavel Stehule)
Allow tab completion of role names in psql \c commands (Ian Barwick)
Allow pg_dump to share a snapshot taken by another session using --snapshot (Simon Riggs, Michael Paquier)
The remote snapshot must have been exported by pg_export_snapshot() or logical replication slot creation. This can be used to share a consistent snapshot across multiple pg_dump processes.
Support table sizes exceeding 8GB in tar archive format (Tom Lane)
The POSIX standard for tar format does not allow elements of a tar archive to exceed 8GB, but most modern implementations of tar support an extension that does allow it. Use the extension format when necessary, rather than failing.
Make pg_dump always print the server and pg_dump versions (Jing Wang)
Previously, version information was only printed in --verbose mode.
Remove the long-ignored -i/--ignore-version option from pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and pg_restore (Fujii Masao)
Support multiple pg_ctl -o options, concatenating their values (Bruce Momjian)
Allow control of pg_ctl's event source logging on MS Windows (MauMau)
This only controls pg_ctl, not the server, which has separate settings in postgresql.conf.
If the server's listen address is set to a wildcard value (0.0.0.0 in IPv4 or :: in IPv6), connect via the loopback address rather than trying to use the wildcard address literally (Kondo Yuta)
This fix primarily affects Windows, since on other platforms pg_ctl will prefer to use a Unix-domain socket.
Move pg_upgrade from contrib to src/bin (Peter Eisentraut)
In connection with this change, the functionality previously provided by the pg_upgrade_support module has been moved into the core server.
Support multiple pg_upgrade -o/-O options, concatenating their values (Bruce Momjian)
Improve database collation comparisons in pg_upgrade (Heikki Linnakangas)
Remove support for upgrading from 8.3 clusters (Bruce Momjian)
Move pgbench from contrib to src/bin (Peter Eisentraut)
Fix calculation of TPS number "excluding connections establishing" (Tatsuo Ishii, Fabien Coelho)
The overhead for connection establishment was miscalculated whenever the number of pgbench threads was less than the number of client connections. Although this is clearly a bug, we won't back-patch it into pre-9.5 branches since it makes TPS numbers not comparable to previous results.
Allow counting of pgbench transactions that take over a specified amount of time (Fabien Coelho)
This is controlled by a new --latency-limit option.
Allow pgbench to generate Gaussian/exponential distributions using \setrandom (Kondo Mitsumasa, Fabien Coelho)
Allow pgbench's \set command to handle arithmetic expressions containing more than one operator, and add % (modulo) to the set of operators it supports (Robert Haas, Fabien Coelho)
Simplify WAL record format (Heikki Linnakangas)
This allows external tools to more easily track what blocks are modified.
Improve the representation of transaction commit and abort WAL records (Andres Freund)
Add atomic memory operations API (Andres Freund)
Allow custom path and scan methods (KaiGai Kohei, Tom Lane)
This allows extensions greater control over the optimizer and executor.
Allow foreign data wrappers to do post-filter locking (Etsuro Fujita)
Foreign tables can now take part in INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING queries (Peter Geoghegan, Heikki Linnakangas, Andres Freund)
Foreign data wrappers must be modified to handle this. INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE is not supported on foreign tables.
Improve hash_create()'s API for selecting simple-binary-key hash functions (Teodor Sigaev, Tom Lane)
Improve parallel execution infrastructure (Robert Haas, Amit Kapila, Noah Misch, Rushabh Lathia, Jeevan Chalke)
Remove Alpha (CPU) and Tru64 (OS) ports (Andres Freund)
Remove swap-byte-based spinlock implementation for ARMv5 and earlier CPUs (Robert Haas)
ARMv5's weak memory ordering made this locking implementation unsafe. Spinlock support is still possible on newer gcc implementations with atomics support.
Generate an error when excessively long (100+ character) file paths are written to tar files (Peter Eisentraut)
Tar does not support such overly-long paths.
Change index operator class for columns pg_seclabel.provider and pg_shseclabel.provider to be text_pattern_ops (Tom Lane)
This avoids possible problems with these indexes when different databases of a cluster have different default collations.
Change the spinlock primitives to function as compiler barriers (Robert Haas)
Allow higher-precision time stamp resolution on Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, and later Windows systems (Craig Ringer)
Install shared libraries to bin in MS Windows (Peter Eisentraut, Michael Paquier)
Install src/test/modules together with contrib on MSVC builds (Michael Paquier)
Allow configure's --with-extra-version option to be honored by the MSVC build (Michael Paquier)
Pass PGFILEDESC into MSVC contrib builds (Michael Paquier)
Add icons to all MSVC-built binaries and version information to all MS Windows binaries (Noah Misch)
MinGW already had such icons.
Add optional-argument support to the internal getopt_long() implementation (Michael Paquier, Andres Freund)
This is used by the MSVC build.
Add statistics for minimum, maximum, mean, and standard deviation times to pg_stat_statements (Mitsumasa Kondo, Andrew Dunstan)
Add pgcrypto function pgp_armor_headers() to extract PGP armor headers (Marko Tiikkaja, Heikki Linnakangas)
Allow empty replacement strings in unaccent (Mohammad Alhashash)
This is useful in languages where diacritic signs are represented as separate characters.
Allow multicharacter source strings in unaccent (Tom Lane)
This could be useful in languages where diacritic signs are represented as separate characters. It also allows more complex unaccent dictionaries.
Add contrib modules tsm_system_rows and tsm_system_time to allow additional table sampling methods (Petr Jelínek)
Add GIN index inspection functions to pageinspect (Heikki Linnakangas, Peter Geoghegan, Michael Paquier)
Add information about buffer pins to pg_buffercache display (Andres Freund)
Allow pgstattuple to report approximate answers with less overhead using pgstattuple_approx() (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
Move dummy_seclabel, test_shm_mq, test_parser, and worker_spi from contrib to src/test/modules (Álvaro Herrera)
These modules are only meant for server testing, so they do not need to be built or installed when packaging PostgreSQL.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.5.1 released on 2016-02-11 - docs
Fix infinite loops and buffer-overrun problems in regular expressions (Tom Lane)
Very large character ranges in bracket expressions could cause infinite loops in some cases, and memory overwrites in other cases. (CVE-2016-0773)
Fix an oversight that caused hash joins to miss joining to some tuples of the inner relation in rare cases (Tomas Vondra, Tom Lane)
Avoid pushdown of HAVING clauses when grouping sets are used (Andrew Gierth)
Fix deparsing of ON CONFLICT arbiter WHERE clauses (Peter Geoghegan)
Make %h and %r escapes in log_line_prefix work for messages emitted due to log_connections (Tom Lane)
Previously, %h/%r started to work just after a new session had emitted the "connection received" log message; now they work for that message too.
Avoid leaking a token handle during SSPI authentication (Christian Ullrich)
Fix psql's \det command to interpret its pattern argument the same way as other \d commands with potentially schema-qualified patterns do (Reece Hart)
In pg_ctl on Windows, check service status to decide where to send output, rather than checking if standard output is a terminal (Michael Paquier)
Fix assorted corner-case bugs in pg_dump's processing of extension member objects (Tom Lane)
Fix improper quoting of domain constraint names in pg_dump (Elvis Pranskevichus)
Make pg_dump mark a view's triggers as needing to be processed after its rule, to prevent possible failure during parallel pg_restore (Tom Lane)
Install guards in pgbench against corner-case overflow conditions during evaluation of script-specified division or modulo operators (Fabien Coelho, Michael Paquier)
Suppress useless warning message when pg_receivexlog connects to a pre-9.4 server (Marco Nenciarini)
Avoid dump/reload problems when using both plpython2 and plpython3 (Tom Lane)
In principle, both versions of PL/Python can be used in the same database, though not in the same session (because the two versions of libpython cannot safely be used concurrently). However, pg_restore and pg_upgrade both do things that can fall foul of the same-session restriction. Work around that by changing the timing of the check.
Fix PL/Python regression tests to pass with Python 3.5 (Peter Eisentraut)
Prevent certain PL/Java parameters from being set by non-superusers (Noah Misch)
This change mitigates a PL/Java security bug (CVE-2016-0766), which was fixed in PL/Java by marking these parameters as superuser-only. To fix the security hazard for sites that update PostgreSQL more frequently than PL/Java, make the core code aware of them also.
Fix ecpg-supplied header files to not contain comments continued from a preprocessor directive line onto the next line (Michael Meskes)
Such a comment is rejected by ecpg. It's not yet clear whether ecpg itself should be changed.
Fix hstore_to_json_loose()'s test for whether an hstore value can be converted to a JSON number (Tom Lane)
Previously this function could be fooled by non-alphanumeric trailing characters, leading to emitting syntactically-invalid JSON.
In contrib/postgres_fdw, fix bugs triggered by use of tableoid in data-modifying commands (Etsuro Fujita, Robert Haas)
Fix ill-advised restriction of NAMEDATALEN to be less than 256 (Robert Haas, Tom Lane)
Improve reproducibility of build output by ensuring filenames are given to the linker in a fixed order (Christoph Berg)
This avoids possible bitwise differences in the produced executable files from one build to the next.
Ensure that dynloader.h is included in the installed header files in MSVC builds (Bruce Momjian, Michael Paquier)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2016a for DST law changes in Cayman Islands, Metlakatla, and Trans-Baikal Territory (Zabaykalsky Krai), plus historical corrections for Pakistan.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.5.2 released on 2016-03-31 - docs
Disable abbreviated keys for string sorting in non-C locales (Robert Haas)
PostgreSQL 9.5 introduced logic for speeding up comparisons of string data types by using the standard C library function strxfrm() as a substitute for strcoll(). It now emerges that most versions of glibc (Linux's implementation of the C library) have buggy implementations of strxfrm() that, in some locales, can produce string comparison results that do not match strcoll(). Until this problem can be better characterized, disable the optimization in all non-C locales. (C locale is safe since it uses neither strcoll() nor strxfrm().)
Unfortunately, this problem affects not only sorting but also entry ordering in B-tree indexes, which means that B-tree indexes on text, varchar, or char columns may now be corrupt if they sort according to an affected locale and were built or modified under PostgreSQL 9.5.0 or 9.5.1. Users should REINDEX indexes that might be affected.
It is not possible at this time to give an exhaustive list of known-affected locales. C locale is known safe, and there is no evidence of trouble in English-based locales such as en_US, but some other popular locales such as de_DE are affected in most glibc versions.
Maintain row-security status properly in cached plans (Stephen Frost)
In a session that performs queries as more than one role, the plan cache might incorrectly re-use a plan that was generated for another role ID, thus possibly applying the wrong set of policies when row-level security (RLS) is in use. (CVE-2016-2193)
Add must-be-superuser checks to some new contrib/pageinspect functions (Andreas Seltenreich)
Most functions in the pageinspect extension that inspect bytea values disallow calls by non-superusers, but brin_page_type() and brin_metapage_info() failed to do so. Passing contrived bytea values to them might crash the server or disclose a few bytes of server memory. Add the missing permissions checks to prevent misuse. (CVE-2016-3065)
Fix incorrect handling of indexed ROW() comparisons (Simon Riggs)
Flaws in a minor optimization introduced in 9.5 caused incorrect results if the ROW() comparison matches the index ordering partially but not exactly (for example, differing column order, or the index contains both ASC and DESC columns). Pending a better solution, the optimization has been removed.
Fix incorrect handling of NULL index entries in indexed ROW() comparisons (Tom Lane)
An index search using a row comparison such as ROW(a, b) > ROW('x', 'y') would stop upon reaching a NULL entry in the b column, ignoring the fact that there might be non-NULL b values associated with later values of a.
Avoid unlikely data-loss scenarios due to renaming files without adequate fsync() calls before and after (Michael Paquier, Tomas Vondra, Andres Freund)
Fix incorrect behavior when rechecking a just-modified row in a query that does SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE and contains some relations that need not be locked (Tom Lane)
Rows from non-locked relations were incorrectly treated as containing all NULLs during the recheck, which could result in incorrectly deciding that the updated row no longer passes the WHERE condition, or in incorrectly outputting NULLs.
Fix bug in json_to_record() when a field of its input object contains a sub-object with a field name matching one of the requested output column names (Tom Lane)
Fix nonsense result from two-argument form of jsonb_object() when called with empty arrays (Michael Paquier, Andrew Dunstan)
Fix misbehavior in jsonb_set() when converting a path array element into an integer for use as an array subscript (Michael Paquier)
Fix misformatting of negative time zone offsets by to_char()'s OF format code (Thomas Munro, Tom Lane)
Fix possible incorrect logging of waits done by INSERT ... ON CONFLICT (Peter Geoghegan)
Log messages would sometimes claim that the wait was due to an exclusion constraint although no such constraint was responsible.
Ignore recovery_min_apply_delay parameter until recovery has reached a consistent state (Michael Paquier)
Previously, standby servers would delay application of WAL records in response to recovery_min_apply_delay even while replaying the initial portion of WAL needed to make their database state valid. Since the standby is useless until it's reached a consistent database state, this was deemed unhelpful.
Correctly handle cases where pg_subtrans is close to XID wraparound during server startup (Jeff Janes)
Fix assorted bugs in logical decoding (Andres Freund)
Trouble cases included tuples larger than one page when replica identity is FULL, UPDATEs that change a primary key within a transaction large enough to be spooled to disk, incorrect reports of "subxact logged without previous toplevel record", and incorrect reporting of a transaction's commit time.
Fix planner error with nested security barrier views when the outer view has a WHERE clause containing a correlated subquery (Dean Rasheed)
Fix memory leak in GIN index searches (Tom Lane)
Fix corner-case crash due to trying to free localeconv() output strings more than once (Tom Lane)
Fix parsing of affix files for ispell dictionaries (Tom Lane)
The code could go wrong if the affix file contained any characters whose byte length changes during case-folding, for example I in Turkish UTF8 locales.
Avoid use of sscanf() to parse ispell dictionary files (Artur Zakirov)
This dodges a portability problem on FreeBSD-derived platforms (including macOS).
Fix atomic-operations code used on PPC with IBM's xlc compiler (Noah Misch)
This error led to rare failures of concurrent operations on that platform.
Avoid a crash on old Windows versions (before 7SP1/2008R2SP1) with an AVX2-capable CPU and a Postgres build done with Visual Studio 2013 (Christian Ullrich)
This is a workaround for a bug in Visual Studio 2013's runtime library, which Microsoft have stated they will not fix in that version.
Fix psql's tab completion logic to handle multibyte characters properly (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Robert Haas)
Fix psql's tab completion for SECURITY LABEL (Tom Lane)
Pressing TAB after SECURITY LABEL might cause a crash or offering of inappropriate keywords.
Make pg_ctl accept a wait timeout from the PGCTLTIMEOUT environment variable, if none is specified on the command line (Noah Misch)
This eases testing of slower buildfarm members by allowing them to globally specify a longer-than-normal timeout for postmaster startup and shutdown.
Fix incorrect test for Windows service status in pg_ctl (Manuel Mathar)
The previous set of minor releases attempted to fix pg_ctl to properly determine whether to send log messages to Window's Event Log, but got the test backwards.
Fix pgbench to correctly handle the combination of -C and -M prepared options (Tom Lane)
In pg_upgrade, skip creating a deletion script when the new data directory is inside the old data directory (Bruce Momjian)
Blind application of the script in such cases would result in loss of the new data directory.
In PL/Perl, properly translate empty Postgres arrays into empty Perl arrays (Alex Hunsaker)
Make PL/Python cope with function names that aren't valid Python identifiers (Jim Nasby)
Fix multiple mistakes in the statistics returned by contrib/pgstattuple's pgstatindex() function (Tom Lane)
Remove dependency on psed in MSVC builds, since it's no longer provided by core Perl (Michael Paquier, Andrew Dunstan)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2016c for DST law changes in Azerbaijan, Chile, Haiti, Palestine, and Russia (Altai, Astrakhan, Kirov, Sakhalin, Ulyanovsk regions), plus historical corrections for Lithuania, Moldova, and Russia (Kaliningrad, Samara, Volgograd).
⇑ Upgrade to 9.5.3 released on 2016-05-12 - docs
Clear the OpenSSL error queue before OpenSSL calls, rather than assuming it's clear already; and make sure we leave it clear afterwards (Peter Geoghegan, Dave Vitek, Peter Eisentraut)
This change prevents problems when there are multiple connections using OpenSSL within a single process and not all the code involved follows the same rules for when to clear the error queue. Failures have been reported specifically when a client application uses SSL connections in libpq concurrently with SSL connections using the PHP, Python, or Ruby wrappers for OpenSSL. It's possible for similar problems to arise within the server as well, if an extension module establishes an outgoing SSL connection.
Fix "failed to build any N-way joins" planner error with a full join enclosed in the right-hand side of a left join (Tom Lane)
Fix incorrect handling of equivalence-class tests in multilevel nestloop plans (Tom Lane)
Given a three-or-more-way equivalence class of variables, such as X.X = Y.Y = Z.Z, it was possible for the planner to omit some of the tests needed to enforce that all the variables are actually equal, leading to join rows being output that didn't satisfy the WHERE clauses. For various reasons, erroneous plans were seldom selected in practice, so that this bug has gone undetected for a long time.
Fix corner-case parser failures occurring when operator_precedence_warning is turned on (Tom Lane)
An example is that SELECT (ARRAY[])::text[] gave an error, though it worked without the parentheses.
Fix query-lifespan memory leak in GIN index scans (Julien Rouhaud)
Fix query-lifespan memory leak and potential index corruption hazard in GIN index insertion (Tom Lane)
The memory leak would typically not amount to much in simple queries, but it could be very substantial during a large GIN index build with high maintenance_work_mem.
Fix possible misbehavior of TH, th, and Y,YYY format codes in to_timestamp() (Tom Lane)
These could advance off the end of the input string, causing subsequent format codes to read garbage.
Fix dumping of rules and views in which the array argument of a value operator ANY (array) construct is a sub-SELECT (Tom Lane)
Disallow newlines in ALTER SYSTEM parameter values (Tom Lane)
The configuration-file parser doesn't support embedded newlines in string literals, so we mustn't allow them in values to be inserted by ALTER SYSTEM.
Fix ALTER TABLE ... REPLICA IDENTITY USING INDEX to work properly if an index on OID is selected (David Rowley)
Avoid possible misbehavior after failing to remove a tablespace symlink (Tom Lane)
Fix crash in logical decoding on alignment-picky platforms (Tom Lane, Andres Freund)
The failure occurred only with a transaction large enough to spill to disk and a primary-key change within that transaction.
Avoid repeated requests for feedback from receiver while shutting down walsender (Nick Cleaton)
Make pg_regress use a startup timeout from the PGCTLTIMEOUT environment variable, if that's set (Tom Lane)
This is for consistency with a behavior recently added to pg_ctl; it eases automated testing on slow machines.
Fix pg_upgrade to correctly restore extension membership for operator families containing only one operator class (Tom Lane)
In such a case, the operator family was restored into the new database, but it was no longer marked as part of the extension. This had no immediate ill effects, but would cause later pg_dump runs to emit output that would cause (harmless) errors on restore.
Fix pg_upgrade to not fail when new-cluster TOAST rules differ from old (Tom Lane)
pg_upgrade had special-case code to handle the situation where the new PostgreSQL version thinks that a table should have a TOAST table while the old version did not. That code was broken, so remove it, and instead do nothing in such cases; there seems no reason to believe that we can't get along fine without a TOAST table if that was okay according to the old version's rules.
Fix atomic operations for PPC when using IBM's XLC compiler (Noah Misch)
Reduce the number of SysV semaphores used by a build configured with --disable-spinlocks (Tom Lane)
Rename internal function strtoi() to strtoint() to avoid conflict with a NetBSD library function (Thomas Munro)
Fix reporting of errors from bind() and listen() system calls on Windows (Tom Lane)
Reduce verbosity of compiler output when building with Microsoft Visual Studio (Christian Ullrich)
Support building with Visual Studio 2015 (Michael Paquier, Petr Jelínek)
Note that builds made with VS2015 will not run on Windows versions before Windows Vista.
Fix putenv() to work properly with Visual Studio 2013 (Michael Paquier)
Avoid possibly-unsafe use of Windows' FormatMessage() function (Christian Ullrich)
Use the FORMAT_MESSAGE_IGNORE_INSERTS flag where appropriate. No live bug is known to exist here, but it seems like a good idea to be careful.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2016d for DST law changes in Russia and Venezuela. There are new zone names Europe/Kirov and Asia/Tomsk to reflect the fact that these regions now have different time zone histories from adjacent regions.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.5.4 released on 2016-08-11 - docs
Fix possible mis-evaluation of nested CASE-WHEN expressions (Heikki Linnakangas, Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
A CASE expression appearing within the test value subexpression of another CASE could become confused about whether its own test value was null or not. Also, inlining of a SQL function implementing the equality operator used by a CASE expression could result in passing the wrong test value to functions called within a CASE expression in the SQL function's body. If the test values were of different data types, a crash might result; moreover such situations could be abused to allow disclosure of portions of server memory. (CVE-2016-5423)
Fix client programs' handling of special characters in database and role names (Noah Misch, Nathan Bossart, Michael Paquier)
Numerous places in vacuumdb and other client programs could become confused by database and role names containing double quotes or backslashes. Tighten up quoting rules to make that safe. Also, ensure that when a conninfo string is used as a database name parameter to these programs, it is correctly treated as such throughout.
Fix handling of paired double quotes in psql's \connect and \password commands to match the documentation.
Introduce a new -reuse-previous option in psql's \connect command to allow explicit control of whether to re-use connection parameters from a previous connection. (Without this, the choice is based on whether the database name looks like a conninfo string, as before.) This allows secure handling of database names containing special characters in pg_dumpall scripts.
pg_dumpall now refuses to deal with database and role names containing carriage returns or newlines, as it seems impractical to quote those characters safely on Windows. In future we may reject such names on the server side, but that step has not been taken yet.
These are considered security fixes because crafted object names containing special characters could have been used to execute commands with superuser privileges the next time a superuser executes pg_dumpall or other routine maintenance operations. (CVE-2016-5424)
Fix corner-case misbehaviors for IS NULL/IS NOT NULL applied to nested composite values (Andrew Gierth, Tom Lane)
The SQL standard specifies that IS NULL should return TRUE for a row of all null values (thus ROW(NULL,NULL) IS NULL yields TRUE), but this is not meant to apply recursively (thus ROW(NULL, ROW(NULL,NULL)) IS NULL yields FALSE). The core executor got this right, but certain planner optimizations treated the test as recursive (thus producing TRUE in both cases), and contrib/postgres_fdw could produce remote queries that misbehaved similarly.
Fix "unrecognized node type" error for INSERT ... ON CONFLICT within a recursive CTE (a WITH item) (Peter Geoghegan)
Fix INSERT ... ON CONFLICT to successfully match index expressions or index predicates that are simplified during the planner's expression preprocessing phase (Tom Lane)
Correctly handle violations of exclusion constraints that apply to the target table of an INSERT ... ON CONFLICT command, but are not one of the selected arbiter indexes (Tom Lane)
Such a case should raise a normal constraint-violation error, but it got into an infinite loop instead.
Fix INSERT ... ON CONFLICT to not fail if the target table has a unique index on OID (Tom Lane)
Make the inet and cidr data types properly reject IPv6 addresses with too many colon-separated fields (Tom Lane)
Prevent crash in close_ps() (the point ## lseg operator) for NaN input coordinates (Tom Lane)
Make it return NULL instead of crashing.
Avoid possible crash in pg_get_expr() when inconsistent values are passed to it (Michael Paquier, Thomas Munro)
Fix several one-byte buffer over-reads in to_number() (Peter Eisentraut)
In several cases the to_number() function would read one more character than it should from the input string. There is a small chance of a crash, if the input happens to be adjacent to the end of memory.
Do not run the planner on the query contained in CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW or CREATE TABLE AS when WITH NO DATA is specified (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
This avoids some unnecessary failure conditions, for example if a stable function invoked by the materialized view depends on a table that doesn't exist yet.
Avoid unsafe intermediate state during expensive paths through heap_update() (Masahiko Sawada, Andres Freund)
Previously, these cases locked the target tuple (by setting its XMAX) but did not WAL-log that action, thus risking data integrity problems if the page were spilled to disk and then a database crash occurred before the tuple update could be completed.
Fix hint bit update during WAL replay of row locking operations (Andres Freund)
The only known consequence of this problem is that row locks held by a prepared, but uncommitted, transaction might fail to be enforced after a crash and restart.
Avoid unnecessary "could not serialize access" errors when acquiring FOR KEY SHARE row locks in serializable mode (Álvaro Herrera)
Make sure "expanded" datums returned by a plan node are read-only (Tom Lane)
This avoids failures in some cases where the result of a lower plan node is referenced in multiple places in upper nodes. So far as core PostgreSQL is concerned, only array values returned by PL/pgSQL functions are at risk; but extensions might use expanded datums for other things.
Avoid crash in postgres -C when the specified variable has a null string value (Michael Paquier)
Prevent unintended waits for the receiver in WAL sender processes (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Fix possible loss of large subtransactions in logical decoding (Petru-Florin Mihancea)
Fix failure of logical decoding when a subtransaction contains no actual changes (Marko Tiikkaja, Andrew Gierth)
Ensure that backends see up-to-date statistics for shared catalogs (Tom Lane)
The statistics collector failed to update the statistics file for shared catalogs after a request from a regular backend. This problem was partially masked because the autovacuum launcher regularly makes requests that did cause such updates; however, it became obvious with autovacuum disabled.
Avoid redundant writes of the statistics files when multiple backends request updates close together (Tom Lane, Tomas Vondra)
Avoid consuming a transaction ID during VACUUM (Alexander Korotkov)
Some cases in VACUUM unnecessarily caused an XID to be assigned to the current transaction. Normally this is negligible, but if one is up against the XID wraparound limit, consuming more XIDs during anti-wraparound vacuums is a very bad thing.
Prevent possible failure when vacuuming multixact IDs in an installation that has been pg_upgrade'd from pre-9.3 (Andrew Gierth, Álvaro Herrera)
The usual symptom of this bug is errors like "MultiXactId NNN has not been created yet -- apparent wraparound".
When a manual ANALYZE specifies a column list, don't reset the table's changes_since_analyze counter (Tom Lane)
If we're only analyzing some columns, we should not prevent routine auto-analyze from happening for the other columns.
Fix ANALYZE's overestimation of n_distinct for a unique or nearly-unique column with many null entries (Tom Lane)
The nulls could get counted as though they were themselves distinct values, leading to serious planner misestimates in some types of queries.
Prevent autovacuum from starting multiple workers for the same shared catalog (Álvaro Herrera)
Normally this isn't much of a problem because the vacuum doesn't take long anyway; but in the case of a severely bloated catalog, it could result in all but one worker uselessly waiting instead of doing useful work on other tables.
Fix bug in b-tree mark/restore processing (Kevin Grittner)
This error could lead to incorrect join results or assertion failures in a merge join whose inner source node is a b-tree indexscan.
Avoid duplicate buffer lock release when abandoning a b-tree index page deletion attempt (Tom Lane)
This mistake prevented VACUUM from completing in some cases involving corrupt b-tree indexes.
Fix building of large (bigger than shared_buffers) hash indexes (Tom Lane)
The code path used for large indexes contained a bug causing incorrect hash values to be inserted into the index, so that subsequent index searches always failed, except for tuples inserted into the index after the initial build.
Prevent infinite loop in GiST index build for geometric columns containing NaN component values (Tom Lane)
Fix possible crash during a nearest-neighbor (ORDER BY distance) indexscan on a contrib/btree_gist index on an interval column (Peter Geoghegan)
Fix "PANIC: failed to add BRIN tuple" error when attempting to update a BRIN index entry (Álvaro Herrera)
Fix possible crash during background worker shutdown (Dmitry Ivanov)
Fix PL/pgSQL's handling of the INTO clause within IMPORT FOREIGN SCHEMA commands (Tom Lane)
Fix contrib/btree_gin to handle the smallest possible bigint value correctly (Peter Eisentraut)
Teach libpq to correctly decode server version from future servers (Peter Eisentraut)
It's planned to switch to two-part instead of three-part server version numbers for releases after 9.6. Make sure that PQserverVersion() returns the correct value for such cases.
Fix ecpg's code for unsigned long long array elements (Michael Meskes)
In pg_dump with both -c and -C options, avoid emitting an unwanted CREATE SCHEMA public command (David Johnston, Tom Lane)
Improve handling of SIGTERM/control-C in parallel pg_dump and pg_restore (Tom Lane)
Make sure that the worker processes will exit promptly, and also arrange to send query-cancel requests to the connected backends, in case they are doing something long-running such as a CREATE INDEX.
Fix error reporting in parallel pg_dump and pg_restore (Tom Lane)
Previously, errors reported by pg_dump or pg_restore worker processes might never make it to the user's console, because the messages went through the master process, and there were various deadlock scenarios that would prevent the master process from passing on the messages. Instead, just print everything to stderr. In some cases this will result in duplicate messages (for instance, if all the workers report a server shutdown), but that seems better than no message.
Ensure that parallel pg_dump or pg_restore on Windows will shut down properly after an error (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Previously, it would report the error, but then just sit until manually stopped by the user.
Make parallel pg_dump fail cleanly when run against a standby server (Magnus Hagander)
This usage is not supported unless --no-synchronized-snapshots is specified, but the error was not handled very well.
Make pg_dump behave better when built without zlib support (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
It didn't work right for parallel dumps, and emitted some rather pointless warnings in other cases.
Make pg_basebackup accept -Z 0 as specifying no compression (Fujii Masao)
Fix makefiles' rule for building AIX shared libraries to be safe for parallel make (Noah Misch)
Fix TAP tests and MSVC scripts to work when build directory's path name contains spaces (Michael Paquier, Kyotaro Horiguchi)
Be more predictable about reporting "statement timeout" versus "lock timeout" (Tom Lane)
On heavily loaded machines, the regression tests sometimes failed due to reporting "lock timeout" even though the statement timeout should have occurred first.
Make regression tests safe for Danish and Welsh locales (Jeff Janes, Tom Lane)
Change some test data that triggered the unusual sorting rules of these locales.
Update our copy of the timezone code to match IANA's tzcode release 2016c (Tom Lane)
This is needed to cope with anticipated future changes in the time zone data files. It also fixes some corner-case bugs in coping with unusual time zones.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2016f for DST law changes in Kemerovo and Novosibirsk, plus historical corrections for Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Morocco.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.6 released on 2016-09-29 - docs
Improve the pg_stat_activity view's information about what a process is waiting for (Amit Kapila, Ildus Kurbangaliev)
Historically a process has only been shown as waiting if it was waiting for a heavyweight lock. Now waits for lightweight locks and buffer pins are also shown in pg_stat_activity. Also, the type of lock being waited for is now visible. These changes replace the waiting column with wait_event_type and wait_event.
In to_char(), do not count a minus sign (when needed) as part of the field width for time-related fields (Bruce Momjian)
For example, to_char('-4 years'::interval, 'YY') now returns -04, rather than -4.
Make extract() behave more reasonably with infinite inputs (Vitaly Burovoy)
Historically the extract() function just returned zero given an infinite timestamp, regardless of the given field name. Make it return infinity or -infinity as appropriate when the requested field is one that is monotonically increasing (e.g, year, epoch), or NULL when it is not (e.g., day, hour). Also, throw the expected error for bad field names.
Remove PL/pgSQL's "feature" that suppressed the innermost line of CONTEXT for messages emitted by RAISE commands (Pavel Stehule)
This ancient backwards-compatibility hack was agreed to have outlived its usefulness.
Fix the default text search parser to allow leading digits in email and host tokens (Artur Zakirov)
In most cases this will result in few changes in the parsing of text. But if you have data where such addresses occur frequently, it may be worth rebuilding dependent tsvector columns and indexes so that addresses of this form will be found properly by text searches.
Extend contrib/unaccent's standard unaccent.rules file to handle all diacritics known to Unicode, and to expand ligatures correctly (Thomas Munro, Léonard Benedetti)
The previous version neglected to convert some less-common letters with diacritic marks. Also, ligatures are now expanded into separate letters. Installations that use this rules file may wish to rebuild tsvector columns and indexes that depend on the result.
Remove the long-deprecated CREATEUSER/NOCREATEUSER options from CREATE ROLE and allied commands (Tom Lane)
CREATEUSER actually meant SUPERUSER, for ancient backwards-compatibility reasons. This has been a constant source of confusion for people who (reasonably) expect it to mean CREATEROLE. It has been deprecated for ten years now, so fix the problem by removing it.
Treat role names beginning with pg_ as reserved (Stephen Frost)
User creation of such role names is now disallowed. This prevents conflicts with built-in roles created by initdb.
Change a column name in the information_schema.routines view from result_cast_character_set_name to result_cast_char_set_name (Clément Prévost)
The SQL:2011 standard specifies the longer name, but that appears to be a mistake, because adjacent column names use the shorter style, as do other information_schema views.
psql's -c option no longer implies --no-psqlrc (Pavel Stehule, Catalin Iacob)
Write --no-psqlrc (or its abbreviation -X) explicitly to obtain the old behavior. Scripts so modified will still work with old versions of psql.
Improve pg_restore's -t option to match all types of relations, not only plain tables (Craig Ringer)
Change the display format used for NextXID in pg_controldata and related places (Joe Conway, Bruce Momjian)
Display epoch-and-transaction-ID values in the format number:number. The previous format number/number was confusingly similar to that used for LSNs.
Update extension functions to be marked parallel-safe where appropriate (Andreas Karlsson)
Many of the standard extensions have been updated to allow their functions to be executed within parallel query worker processes. These changes will not take effect in databases pg_upgrade'd from prior versions unless you apply ALTER EXTENSION UPDATE to each such extension (in each database of a cluster).
Parallel queries (Robert Haas, Amit Kapila, David Rowley, many others)
With 9.6, PostgreSQL introduces initial support for parallel execution of large queries. Only strictly read-only queries where the driving table is accessed via a sequential scan can be parallelized. Hash joins and nested loops can be performed in parallel, as can aggregation (for supported aggregates). Much remains to be done, but this is already a useful set of features.
Parallel query execution is not (yet) enabled by default. To allow it, set the new configuration parameter max_parallel_workers_per_gather to a value larger than zero. Additional control over use of parallelism is available through other new configuration parameters force_parallel_mode, parallel_setup_cost, parallel_tuple_cost, and min_parallel_relation_size.
Provide infrastructure for marking the parallel-safety status of functions (Robert Haas, Amit Kapila)
Allow GIN index builds to make effective use of maintenance_work_mem settings larger than 1 GB (Robert Abraham, Teodor Sigaev)
Add pages deleted from a GIN index's pending list to the free space map immediately (Jeff Janes, Teodor Sigaev)
This reduces bloat if the table is not vacuumed often.
Add gin_clean_pending_list() function to allow manual invocation of pending-list cleanup for a GIN index (Jeff Janes)
Formerly, such cleanup happened only as a byproduct of vacuuming or analyzing the parent table.
Improve handling of dead index tuples in GiST indexes (Anastasia Lubennikova)
Dead index tuples are now marked as such when an index scan notices that the corresponding heap tuple is dead. When inserting tuples, marked-dead tuples will be removed if needed to make space on the page.
Add an SP-GiST operator class for type box (Alexander Lebedev)
Improve sorting performance by using quicksort, not replacement selection sort, when performing external sort steps (Peter Geoghegan)
The new approach makes better use of the CPU cache for typical cache sizes and data volumes. Where necessary, the behavior can be adjusted via the new configuration parameter replacement_sort_tuples.
Speed up text sorts where the same string occurs multiple times (Peter Geoghegan)
Speed up sorting of uuid, bytea, and char(n) fields by using "abbreviated" keys (Peter Geoghegan)
Support for abbreviated keys has also been added to the non-default operator classes text_pattern_ops, varchar_pattern_ops, and bpchar_pattern_ops. Processing of ordered-set aggregates can also now exploit abbreviated keys.
Speed up CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY by treating TIDs as 64-bit integers during sorting (Peter Geoghegan)
Reduce contention for the ProcArrayLock (Amit Kapila, Robert Haas)
Improve performance by moving buffer content locks into the buffer descriptors (Andres Freund, Simon Riggs)
Replace shared-buffer header spinlocks with atomic operations to improve scalability (Alexander Korotkov, Andres Freund)
Use atomic operations, rather than a spinlock, to protect an LWLock's wait queue (Andres Freund)
Partition the shared hash table freelist to reduce contention on multi-CPU-socket servers (Aleksander Alekseev)
Reduce interlocking on standby servers during the replay of btree index vacuuming operations (Simon Riggs)
This change avoids substantial replication delays that sometimes occurred while replaying such operations.
Improve ANALYZE's estimates for columns with many nulls (Tomas Vondra, Alex Shulgin)
Previously ANALYZE tended to underestimate the number of non-NULL distinct values in a column with many NULLs, and was also inaccurate in computing the most-common values.
Improve planner's estimate of the number of distinct values in a query result (Tomas Vondra)
Use foreign key relationships to infer selectivity for join predicates (Tomas Vondra, David Rowley)
If a table t has a foreign key restriction, say (a,b) REFERENCES r (x,y), then a WHERE condition such as t.a = r.x AND t.b = r.y cannot select more than one r row per t row. The planner formerly considered these AND conditions to be independent and would often drastically misestimate selectivity as a result. Now it compares the WHERE conditions to applicable foreign key constraints and produces better estimates.
Avoid re-vacuuming pages containing only frozen tuples (Masahiko Sawada, Robert Haas, Andres Freund)
Formerly, anti-wraparound vacuum had to visit every page of a table, even pages where there was nothing to do. Now, pages containing only already-frozen tuples are identified in the table's visibility map, and can be skipped by vacuum even when doing transaction wraparound prevention. This should greatly reduce the cost of maintaining large tables containing mostly-unchanging data.
If necessary, vacuum can be forced to process all-frozen pages using the new DISABLE_PAGE_SKIPPING option. Normally this should never be needed, but it might help in recovering from visibility-map corruption.
Avoid useless heap-truncation attempts during VACUUM (Jeff Janes, Tom Lane)
This change avoids taking an exclusive table lock in some cases where no truncation is possible. The main benefit comes from avoiding unnecessary query cancellations on standby servers.
Allow old MVCC snapshots to be invalidated after a configurable timeout (Kevin Grittner)
Normally, deleted tuples cannot be physically removed by vacuuming until the last transaction that could "see" them is gone. A transaction that stays open for a long time can thus cause considerable table bloat because space cannot be recycled. This feature allows setting a time-based limit, via the new configuration parameter old_snapshot_threshold, on how long an MVCC snapshot is guaranteed to be valid. After that, dead tuples are candidates for removal. A transaction using an outdated snapshot will get an error if it attempts to read a page that potentially could have contained such data.
Ignore GROUP BY columns that are functionally dependent on other columns (David Rowley)
If a GROUP BY clause includes all columns of a non-deferred primary key, as well as other columns of the same table, those other columns are redundant and can be dropped from the grouping. This saves computation in many common cases.
Allow use of an index-only scan on a partial index when the index's WHERE clause references columns that are not indexed (Tomas Vondra, Kyotaro Horiguchi)
For example, an index defined by CREATE INDEX tidx_partial ON t(b) WHERE a > 0 can now be used for an index-only scan by a query that specifies WHERE a > 0 and does not otherwise use a. Previously this was disallowed because a is not listed as an index column.
Perform checkpoint writes in sorted order (Fabien Coelho, Andres Freund)
Previously, checkpoints wrote out dirty pages in whatever order they happen to appear in shared buffers, which usually is nearly random. That performs poorly, especially on rotating media. This change causes checkpoint-driven writes to be done in order by file and block number, and to be balanced across tablespaces.
Where feasible, trigger kernel writeback after a configurable number of writes, to prevent accumulation of dirty data in kernel disk buffers (Fabien Coelho, Andres Freund)
PostgreSQL writes data to the kernel's disk cache, from where it will be flushed to physical storage in due time. Many operating systems are not smart about managing this and allow large amounts of dirty data to accumulate before deciding to flush it all at once, causing long delays for new I/O requests until the flushing finishes. This change attempts to alleviate this problem by explicitly requesting data flushes after a configurable interval.
On Linux, sync_file_range() is used for this purpose, and the feature is on by default on Linux because that function has few downsides. This flushing capability is also available on other platforms if they have msync() or posix_fadvise(), but those interfaces have some undesirable side-effects so the feature is disabled by default on non-Linux platforms.
The new configuration parameters backend_flush_after, bgwriter_flush_after, checkpoint_flush_after, and wal_writer_flush_after control this behavior.
Improve aggregate-function performance by sharing calculations across multiple aggregates if they have the same arguments and transition functions (David Rowley)
For example, SELECT AVG(x), VARIANCE(x) FROM tab can use a single per-row computation for both aggregates.
Speed up visibility tests for recently-created tuples by checking the current transaction's snapshot, not pg_clog, to decide if the source transaction should be considered committed (Jeff Janes, Tom Lane)
Allow tuple hint bits to be set sooner than before (Andres Freund)
Improve performance of short-lived prepared transactions (Stas Kelvich, Simon Riggs, Pavan Deolasee)
Two-phase commit information is now written only to WAL during PREPARE TRANSACTION, and will be read back from WAL during COMMIT PREPARED if that happens soon thereafter. A separate state file is created only if the pending transaction does not get committed or aborted by the time of the next checkpoint.
Improve performance of memory context destruction (Jan Wieck)
Improve performance of resource owners with many tracked objects (Aleksander Alekseev)
Improve speed of the output functions for timestamp, time, and date data types (David Rowley, Andres Freund)
Avoid some unnecessary cancellations of hot-standby queries during replay of actions that take AccessExclusive locks (Jeff Janes)
Extend relations multiple blocks at a time when there is contention for the relation's extension lock (Dilip Kumar)
This improves scalability by decreasing contention.
Increase the number of clog buffers for better scalability (Amit Kapila, Andres Freund)
Speed up expression evaluation in PL/pgSQL by keeping ParamListInfo entries for simple variables valid at all times (Tom Lane)
Avoid reducing the SO_SNDBUF setting below its default on recent Windows versions (Chen Huajun)
Disable update_process_title by default on Windows (Takayuki Tsunakawa)
The overhead of updating the process title is much larger on Windows than most other platforms, and it is also less useful to do it since most Windows users do not have tools that can display process titles.
Add pg_stat_progress_vacuum system view to provide progress reporting for VACUUM operations (Amit Langote, Robert Haas, Vinayak Pokale, Rahila Syed)
Add pg_control_system(), pg_control_checkpoint(), pg_control_recovery(), and pg_control_init() functions to expose fields of pg_control to SQL (Joe Conway, Michael Paquier)
Add pg_config system view (Joe Conway)
This view exposes the same information available from the pg_config command-line utility, namely assorted compile-time configuration information for PostgreSQL.
Add a confirmed_flush_lsn column to the pg_replication_slots system view (Marko Tiikkaja)
Add pg_stat_wal_receiver system view to provide information about the state of a hot-standby server's WAL receiver process (Michael Paquier)
Add pg_blocking_pids() function to reliably identify which sessions block which others (Tom Lane)
This function returns an array of the process IDs of any sessions that are blocking the session with the given process ID. Historically users have obtained such information using a self-join on the pg_locks view. However, it is unreasonably tedious to do it that way with any modicum of correctness, and the addition of parallel queries has made the old approach entirely impractical, since locks might be held or awaited by child worker processes rather than the session's main process.
Add function pg_current_xlog_flush_location() to expose the current transaction log flush location (Tomas Vondra)
Add function pg_notification_queue_usage() to report how full the NOTIFY queue is (Brendan Jurd)
Limit the verbosity of memory context statistics dumps (Tom Lane)
The memory usage dump that is output to the postmaster log during an out-of-memory failure now summarizes statistics when there are a large number of memory contexts, rather than possibly generating a very large report. There is also a "grand total" summary line now.
Add a BSD authentication method to allow use of the BSD Authentication service for PostgreSQL client authentication (Marisa Emerson)
BSD Authentication is currently only available on OpenBSD.
When using PAM authentication, provide the client IP address or host name to PAM modules via the PAM_RHOST item (Grzegorz Sampolski)
Provide detail in the postmaster log for more types of password authentication failure (Tom Lane)
All ordinarily-reachable password authentication failure cases should now provide specific DETAIL fields in the log.
Support RADIUS passwords up to 128 characters long (Marko Tiikkaja)
Add new SSPI authentication parameters compat_realm and upn_username to control whether NetBIOS or Kerberos realm names and user names are used during SSPI authentication (Christian Ullrich)
Allow sessions to be terminated automatically if they are in idle-in-transaction state for too long (Vik Fearing)
This behavior is controlled by the new configuration parameter idle_in_transaction_session_timeout. It can be useful to prevent forgotten transactions from holding locks or preventing vacuum cleanup for too long.
Raise the maximum allowed value of checkpoint_timeout to 24 hours (Simon Riggs)
Allow effective_io_concurrency to be set per-tablespace to support cases where different tablespaces have different I/O characteristics (Julien Rouhaud)
Add log_line_prefix option %n to print the current time in Unix epoch form, with milliseconds (Tomas Vondra, Jeff Davis)
Add syslog_sequence_numbers and syslog_split_messages configuration parameters to provide more control over the message format when logging to syslog (Peter Eisentraut)
Merge the archive and hot_standby values of the wal_level configuration parameter into a single new value replica (Peter Eisentraut)
Making a distinction between these settings is no longer useful, and merging them is a step towards a planned future simplification of replication setup. The old names are still accepted but are converted to replica internally.
Add configure option --with-systemd to enable calling sd_notify() at server start and stop (Peter Eisentraut)
This allows the use of systemd service units of type notify, which greatly simplifies the management of PostgreSQL under systemd.
Allow the server's SSL key file to have group read access if it is owned by root (Christoph Berg)
Formerly, we insisted the key file be owned by the user running the PostgreSQL server, but that is inconvenient on some systems (such as Debian) that are configured to manage certificates centrally. Therefore, allow the case where the key file is owned by root and has group read access. It is up to the operating system administrator to ensure that the group does not include any untrusted users.
Force backends to exit if the postmaster dies (Rajeev Rastogi, Robert Haas)
Under normal circumstances the postmaster should always outlive its child processes. If for some reason the postmaster dies, force backend sessions to exit with an error. Formerly, existing backends would continue to run until their clients disconnect, but that is unsafe and inefficient. It also prevents a new postmaster from being started until the last old backend has exited. Backends will detect postmaster death when waiting for client I/O, so the exit will not be instantaneous, but it should happen no later than the end of the current query.
Check for serializability conflicts before reporting constraint-violation failures (Thomas Munro)
When using serializable transaction isolation, it is desirable that any error due to concurrent transactions should manifest as a serialization failure, thereby cueing the application that a retry might succeed. Unfortunately, this does not reliably happen for duplicate-key failures caused by concurrent insertions. This change ensures that such an error will be reported as a serialization error if the application explicitly checked for the presence of a conflicting key (and did not find it) earlier in the transaction.
Ensure that invalidation messages are recorded in WAL even when issued by a transaction that has no XID assigned (Andres Freund)
This fixes some corner cases in which transactions on standby servers failed to notice changes, such as new indexes.
Prevent multiple processes from trying to clean a GIN index's pending list concurrently (Teodor Sigaev, Jeff Janes)
This had been intentionally allowed, but it causes race conditions that can result in vacuum missing index entries it needs to delete.
Allow synchronous replication to support multiple simultaneous synchronous standby servers, not just one (Masahiko Sawada, Beena Emerson, Michael Paquier, Fujii Masao, Kyotaro Horiguchi)
The number of standby servers that must acknowledge a commit before it is considered complete is now configurable as part of the synchronous_standby_names parameter.
Add new setting remote_apply for configuration parameter synchronous_commit (Thomas Munro)
In this mode, the master waits for the transaction to be applied on the standby server, not just written to disk. That means that you can count on a transaction started on the standby to see all commits previously acknowledged by the master.
Add a feature to the replication protocol, and a corresponding option to pg_create_physical_replication_slot(), to allow reserving WAL immediately when creating a replication slot (Gurjeet Singh, Michael Paquier)
This allows the creation of a replication slot to guarantee that all the WAL needed for a base backup will be available.
Add a --slot option to pg_basebackup (Peter Eisentraut)
This lets pg_basebackup use a replication slot defined for WAL streaming. After the base backup completes, selecting the same slot for regular streaming replication allows seamless startup of the new standby server.
Extend pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup() to support non-exclusive backups (Magnus Hagander)
Allow functions that return sets of tuples to return simple NULLs (Andrew Gierth, Tom Lane)
In the context of SELECT FROM function(...), a function that returned a set of composite values was previously not allowed to return a plain NULL value as part of the set. Now that is allowed and interpreted as a row of NULLs. This avoids corner-case errors with, for example, unnesting an array of composite values.
Fully support array subscripts and field selections in the target column list of an INSERT with multiple VALUES rows (Tom Lane)
Previously, such cases failed if the same target column was mentioned more than once, e.g., INSERT INTO tab (x[1], x[2]) VALUES (...).
When appropriate, postpone evaluation of SELECT output expressions until after an ORDER BY sort (Konstantin Knizhnik)
This change ensures that volatile or expensive functions in the output list are executed in the order suggested by ORDER BY, and that they are not evaluated more times than required when there is a LIMIT clause. Previously, these properties held if the ordering was performed by an index scan or pre-merge-join sort, but not if it was performed by a top-level sort.
Widen counters recording the number of tuples processed to 64 bits (Andreas Scherbaum)
This change allows command tags, e.g. SELECT, to correctly report tuple counts larger than 4 billion. This also applies to PL/pgSQL's GET DIAGNOSTICS ... ROW_COUNT command.
Avoid doing encoding conversions by converting through the MULE_INTERNAL encoding (Tom Lane)
Previously, many conversions for Cyrillic and Central European single-byte encodings were done by converting to a related MULE_INTERNAL coding scheme and then to the destination encoding. Aside from being inefficient, this meant that when the conversion encountered an untranslatable character, the error message would confusingly complain about failure to convert to or from MULE_INTERNAL, rather than the user-visible encoding.
Consider performing joins of foreign tables remotely only when the tables will be accessed under the same role ID (Shigeru Hanada, Ashutosh Bapat, Etsuro Fujita)
Previously, the foreign join pushdown infrastructure left the question of security entirely up to individual foreign data wrappers, but that made it too easy for an FDW to inadvertently create subtle security holes. So, make it the core code's job to determine which role ID will access each table, and do not attempt join pushdown unless the role is the same for all relevant relations.
Allow COPY to copy the output of an INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE ... RETURNING query (Marko Tiikkaja)
Previously, an intermediate CTE had to be written to get this result.
Introduce ALTER object DEPENDS ON EXTENSION (Abhijit Menon-Sen)
This command allows a database object to be marked as depending on an extension, so that it will be dropped automatically if the extension is dropped (without needing CASCADE). However, the object is not part of the extension, and thus will be dumped separately by pg_dump.
Make ALTER object SET SCHEMA do nothing when the object is already in the requested schema, rather than throwing an error as it historically has for most object types (Marti Raudsepp)
Add options to ALTER OPERATOR to allow changing the selectivity functions associated with an existing operator (Yury Zhuravlev)
Add an IF NOT EXISTS option to ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN (Fabrízio de Royes Mello)
Reduce the lock strength needed by ALTER TABLE when setting fillfactor and autovacuum-related relation options (Fabrízio de Royes Mello, Simon Riggs)
Introduce CREATE ACCESS METHOD to allow extensions to create index access methods (Alexander Korotkov, Petr Jelínek)
Add a CASCADE option to CREATE EXTENSION to automatically create any extensions the requested one depends on (Petr Jelínek)
Make CREATE TABLE ... LIKE include an OID column if any source table has one (Bruce Momjian)
If a CHECK constraint is declared NOT VALID in a table creation command, automatically mark it as valid (Amit Langote, Amul Sul)
This is safe because the table has no existing rows. This matches the longstanding behavior of FOREIGN KEY constraints.
Fix DROP OPERATOR to clear pg_operator.oprcom and pg_operator.oprnegate links to the dropped operator (Roma Sokolov)
Formerly such links were left as-is, which could pose a problem in the somewhat unlikely event that the dropped operator's OID was reused for another operator.
Do not show the same subplan twice in EXPLAIN output (Tom Lane)
In certain cases, typically involving SubPlan nodes in index conditions, EXPLAIN would print data for the same subplan twice.
Disallow creation of indexes on system columns, except for OID columns (David Rowley)
Such indexes were never considered supported, and would very possibly misbehave since the system might change the system-column fields of a tuple without updating indexes. However, previously there were no error checks to prevent them from being created.
Use the privilege system to manage access to sensitive functions (Stephen Frost)
Formerly, many security-sensitive functions contained hard-wired checks that would throw an error if they were called by a non-superuser. This forced the use of superuser roles for some relatively pedestrian tasks. The hard-wired error checks are now gone in favor of making initdb revoke the default public EXECUTE privilege on these functions. This allows installations to choose to grant usage of such functions to trusted roles that do not need all superuser privileges.
Create some built-in roles that can be used to grant access to what were previously superuser-only functions (Stephen Frost)
Currently the only such role is pg_signal_backend, but more are expected to be added in future.
Improve full-text search to support searching for phrases, that is, lexemes appearing adjacent to each other in a specific order, or with a specified distance between them (Teodor Sigaev, Oleg Bartunov, Dmitry Ivanov)
A phrase-search query can be specified in tsquery input using the new operators <-> and <N>. The former means that the lexemes before and after it must appear adjacent to each other in that order. The latter means they must be exactly N lexemes apart.
Allow omitting one or both boundaries in an array slice specifier, e.g. array_col[3:] (Yury Zhuravlev)
Omitted boundaries are taken as the upper or lower limit of the corresponding array subscript. This allows simpler specification for many common use-cases.
Be more careful about out-of-range dates and timestamps (Vitaly Burovoy)
This change prevents unexpected out-of-range errors for timestamp with time zone values very close to the implementation limits. Previously, the "same" value might be accepted or not depending on the timezone setting, meaning that a dump and reload could fail on a value that had been accepted when presented. Now the limits are enforced according to the equivalent UTC time, not local time, so as to be independent of timezone.
Also, PostgreSQL is now more careful to detect overflow in operations that compute new date or timestamp values, such as date + integer.
For geometric data types, make sure infinity and NaN component values are treated consistently during input and output (Tom Lane)
Such values will now always print the same as they would in a simple float8 column, and be accepted the same way on input. Previously the behavior was platform-dependent.
Upgrade the ispell dictionary type to handle modern Hunspell files and support more languages (Artur Zakirov)
Implement look-behind constraints in regular expressions (Tom Lane)
A look-behind constraint is like a lookahead constraint in that it consumes no text; but it checks for existence (or nonexistence) of a match ending at the current point in the string, rather than one starting at the current point. Similar features exist in many other regular-expression engines.
In regular expressions, if an apparent three-digit octal escape \nnn would exceed 377 (255 decimal), assume it is a two-digit octal escape instead (Tom Lane)
This makes the behavior match current Tcl releases.
Add transaction ID operators xid <> xid and xid <> int4, for consistency with the corresponding equality operators (Michael Paquier)
Add jsonb_insert() function to insert a new element into a jsonb array, or a not-previously-existing key into a jsonb object (Dmitry Dolgov)
Improve the accuracy of the ln(), log(), exp(), and pow() functions for type numeric (Dean Rasheed)
Add a scale(numeric) function to extract the display scale of a numeric value (Marko Tiikkaja)
Add trigonometric functions that work in degrees (Dean Rasheed)
For example, sind() measures its argument in degrees, whereas sin() measures in radians. These functions go to some lengths to deliver exact results for values where an exact result can be expected, for instance sind(30) = 0.5.
Ensure that trigonometric functions handle infinity and NaN inputs per the POSIX standard (Dean Rasheed)
The POSIX standard says that these functions should return NaN for NaN input, and should throw an error for out-of-range inputs including infinity. Previously our behavior varied across platforms.
Make to_timestamp(float8) convert float infinity to timestamp infinity (Vitaly Burovoy)
Formerly it just failed on an infinite input.
Add new functions for tsvector data (Stas Kelvich)
The new functions are ts_delete(), ts_filter(), unnest(), tsvector_to_array(), array_to_tsvector(), and a variant of setweight() that sets the weight only for specified lexeme(s).
Allow ts_stat() and tsvector_update_trigger() to operate on values that are of types binary-compatible with the expected argument type, not just exactly that type; for example allow citext where text is expected (Teodor Sigaev)
Add variadic functions num_nulls() and num_nonnulls() that count the number of their arguments that are null or non-null (Marko Tiikkaja)
An example usage is CHECK(num_nonnulls(a,b,c) = 1) which asserts that exactly one of a,b,c is not NULL. These functions can also be used to count the number of null or nonnull elements in an array.
Add function parse_ident() to split a qualified, possibly quoted SQL identifier into its parts (Pavel Stehule)
In to_number(), interpret a V format code as dividing by 10 to the power of the number of digits following V (Bruce Momjian)
This makes it operate in an inverse fashion to to_char().
Make the to_reg*() functions accept type text not cstring (Petr Korobeinikov)
This avoids the need to write an explicit cast in most cases where the argument is not a simple literal constant.
Add pg_size_bytes() function to convert human-readable size strings to numbers (Pavel Stehule, Vitaly Burovoy, Dean Rasheed)
This function converts strings like those produced by pg_size_pretty() into bytes. An example usage is SELECT oid::regclass FROM pg_class WHERE pg_total_relation_size(oid) > pg_size_bytes('10 GB').
In pg_size_pretty(), format negative numbers similarly to positive ones (Adrian Vondendriesch)
Previously, negative numbers were never abbreviated, just printed in bytes.
Add an optional missing_ok argument to the current_setting() function (David Christensen)
This allows avoiding an error for an unrecognized parameter name, instead returning a NULL.
Change various catalog-inspection functions to return NULL for invalid input (Michael Paquier)
pg_get_viewdef() now returns NULL if given an invalid view OID, and several similar functions likewise return NULL for bad input. Previously, such cases usually led to "cache lookup failed" errors, which are not meant to occur in user-facing cases.
Fix pg_replication_origin_xact_reset() to not have any arguments (Fujii Masao)
The documentation said that it has no arguments, and the C code did not expect any arguments, but the entry in pg_proc mistakenly specified two arguments.
In PL/pgSQL, detect mismatched CONTINUE and EXIT statements while compiling a function, rather than at execution time (Jim Nasby)
Extend PL/Python's error-reporting and message-reporting functions to allow specifying additional message fields besides the primary error message (Pavel Stehule)
Allow PL/Python functions to call themselves recursively via SPI, and fix the behavior when multiple set-returning PL/Python functions are called within one query (Alexey Grishchenko, Tom Lane)
Fix session-lifespan memory leaks in PL/Python (Heikki Linnakangas, Haribabu Kommi, Tom Lane)
Modernize PL/Tcl to use Tcl's "object" APIs instead of simple strings (Jim Nasby, Karl Lehenbauer)
This can improve performance substantially in some cases. Note that PL/Tcl now requires Tcl 8.4 or later.
In PL/Tcl, make database-reported errors return additional information in Tcl's errorCode global variable (Jim Nasby, Tom Lane)
This feature follows the Tcl convention for returning auxiliary data about an error.
Fix PL/Tcl to perform encoding conversion between the database encoding and UTF-8, which is what Tcl expects (Tom Lane)
Previously, strings were passed through without conversion, leading to misbehavior with non-ASCII characters when the database encoding was not UTF-8.
Add a nonlocalized version of the severity field in error and notice messages (Tom Lane)
This change allows client code to determine severity of an error or notice without having to worry about localized variants of the severity strings.
Introduce a feature in libpq whereby the CONTEXT field of messages can be suppressed, either always or only for non-error messages (Pavel Stehule)
The default behavior of PQerrorMessage() is now to print CONTEXT only for errors. The new function PQsetErrorContextVisibility() can be used to adjust this.
Add support in libpq for regenerating an error message with a different verbosity level (Alex Shulgin)
This is done with the new function PQresultVerboseErrorMessage(). This supports psql's new \errverbose feature, and may be useful for other clients as well.
Improve libpq's PQhost() function to return useful data for default Unix-socket connections (Tom Lane)
Previously it would return NULL if no explicit host specification had been given; now it returns the default socket directory path.
Fix ecpg's lexer to handle line breaks within comments starting on preprocessor directive lines (Michael Meskes)
Add a --strict-names option to pg_dump and pg_restore (Pavel Stehule)
This option causes the program to complain if there is no match for a -t or -n option, rather than silently doing nothing.
In pg_dump, dump locally-made changes of privilege assignments for system objects (Stephen Frost)
While it has always been possible for a superuser to change the privilege assignments for built-in or extension-created objects, such changes were formerly lost in a dump and reload. Now, pg_dump recognizes and dumps such changes. (This works only when dumping from a 9.6 or later server, however.)
Allow pg_dump to dump non-extension-owned objects that are within an extension-owned schema (Martín Marqués)
Previously such objects were ignored because they were mistakenly assumed to belong to the extension owning their schema.
In pg_dump output, include the table name in object tags for object types that are only uniquely named per-table (for example, triggers) (Peter Eisentraut)
Support multiple -c and -f command-line options (Pavel Stehule, Catalin Iacob)
The specified operations are carried out in the order in which the options are given, and then psql terminates.
Add a \crosstabview command that prints the results of a query in a cross-tabulated display (Daniel Vérité)
In the crosstab display, data values from one query result column are placed in a grid whose column and row headers come from other query result columns.
Add an \errverbose command that shows the last server error at full verbosity (Alex Shulgin)
This is useful after getting an unexpected error — you no longer need to adjust the VERBOSITY variable and recreate the failure in order to see error fields that are not shown by default.
Add \ev and \sv commands for editing and showing view definitions (Petr Korobeinikov)
These are parallel to the existing \ef and \sf commands for functions.
Add a \gexec command that executes a query and re-submits the result(s) as new queries (Corey Huinker)
Allow \pset C string to set the table title, for consistency with \C string (Bruce Momjian)
In \pset expanded auto mode, do not use expanded format for query results with only one column (Andreas Karlsson, Robert Haas)
Improve the headers output by the \watch command (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
Include the \pset title string if one has been set, and shorten the prefabricated part of the header to be timestamp (every Ns). Also, the timestamp format now obeys psql's locale environment.
Improve tab-completion logic to consider the entire input query, not only the current line (Tom Lane)
Previously, breaking a command into multiple lines defeated any tab completion rules that needed to see words on earlier lines.
Numerous minor improvements in tab-completion behavior (Peter Eisentraut, Vik Fearing, Kevin Grittner, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Jeff Janes, Andreas Karlsson, Fujii Masao, Thomas Munro, Masahiko Sawada, Pavel Stehule)
Add a PROMPT option %p to insert the process ID of the connected backend (Julien Rouhaud)
Introduce a feature whereby the CONTEXT field of messages can be suppressed, either always or only for non-error messages (Pavel Stehule)
Printing CONTEXT only for errors is now the default behavior. This can be changed by setting the special variable SHOW_CONTEXT.
Make \df+ show function access privileges and parallel-safety attributes (Michael Paquier)
SQL commands in pgbench scripts are now ended by semicolons, not newlines (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Tom Lane)
This change allows SQL commands in scripts to span multiple lines. Existing custom scripts will need to be modified to add a semicolon at the end of each line that does not have one already. (Doing so does not break the script for use with older versions of pgbench.)
Support floating-point arithmetic, as well as some built-in functions, in expressions in backslash commands (Fabien Coelho)
Replace \setrandom with built-in functions (Fabien Coelho)
The new built-in functions include random(), random_exponential(), and random_gaussian(), which perform the same work as \setrandom, but are easier to use since they can be embedded in larger expressions. Since these additions have made \setrandom obsolete, remove it.
Allow invocation of multiple copies of the built-in scripts, not only custom scripts (Fabien Coelho)
This is done with the new -b switch, which works similarly to -f for custom scripts.
Allow changing the selection probabilities (weights) for scripts (Fabien Coelho)
When multiple scripts are specified, each pgbench transaction randomly chooses one to execute. Formerly this was always done with uniform probability, but now different selection probabilities can be specified for different scripts.
Collect statistics for each script in a multi-script run (Fabien Coelho)
This feature adds an intermediate level of detail to existing global and per-command statistics printouts.
Add a --progress-timestamp option to report progress with Unix epoch timestamps, instead of time since the run started (Fabien Coelho)
Allow the number of client connections (-c) to not be an exact multiple of the number of threads (-j) (Fabien Coelho)
When the -T option is used, stop promptly at the end of the specified time (Fabien Coelho)
Previously, specifying a low transaction rate could cause pgbench to wait significantly longer than specified.
Improve error reporting during initdb's post-bootstrap phase (Tom Lane)
Previously, an error here led to reporting the entire input file as the "failing query"; now just the current query is reported. To get the desired behavior, queries in initdb's input files must be separated by blank lines.
Speed up initdb by using just one standalone-backend session for all the post-bootstrap steps (Tom Lane)
Improve pg_rewind so that it can work when the target timeline changes (Alexander Korotkov)
This allows, for example, rewinding a promoted standby back to some state of the old master's timeline.
Remove obsolete heap_formtuple/heap_modifytuple/heap_deformtuple functions (Peter Geoghegan)
Add macros to make AllocSetContextCreate() calls simpler and safer (Tom Lane)
Writing out the individual sizing parameters for a memory context is now deprecated in favor of using one of the new macros ALLOCSET_DEFAULT_SIZES, ALLOCSET_SMALL_SIZES, or ALLOCSET_START_SMALL_SIZES. Existing code continues to work, however.
Unconditionally use static inline functions in header files (Andres Freund)
This may result in warnings and/or wasted code space with very old compilers, but the notational improvement seems worth it.
Improve TAP testing infrastructure (Michael Paquier, Craig Ringer, Álvaro Herrera, Stephen Frost)
Notably, it is now possible to test recovery scenarios using this infrastructure.
Make trace_lwlocks identify individual locks by name (Robert Haas)
Improve psql's tab-completion code infrastructure (Thomas Munro, Michael Paquier)
Tab-completion rules are now considerably easier to write, and more compact.
Nail the pg_shseclabel system catalog into cache, so that it is available for access during connection authentication (Adam Brightwell)
The core code does not use this catalog for authentication, but extensions might wish to consult it.
Restructure index access method API to hide most of it at the C level (Alexander Korotkov, Andrew Gierth)
This change modernizes the index AM API to look more like the designs we have adopted for foreign data wrappers and tablesample handlers. This simplifies the C code and makes it much more practical to define index access methods in installable extensions. A consequence is that most of the columns of the pg_am system catalog have disappeared. New inspection functions have been added to allow SQL queries to determine index AM properties that used to be discoverable from pg_am.
Add pg_init_privs system catalog to hold original privileges of initdb-created and extension-created objects (Stephen Frost)
This infrastructure allows pg_dump to dump changes that an installation may have made in privileges attached to system objects. Formerly, such changes would be lost in a dump and reload, but now they are preserved.
Change the way that extensions allocate custom LWLocks (Amit Kapila, Robert Haas)
The RequestAddinLWLocks() function is removed, and replaced by RequestNamedLWLockTranche(). This allows better identification of custom LWLocks, and is less error-prone.
Improve the isolation tester to allow multiple sessions to wait concurrently, allowing testing of deadlock scenarios (Robert Haas)
Introduce extensible node types (KaiGai Kohei)
This change allows FDWs or custom scan providers to store data in a plan tree in a more convenient format than was previously possible.
Make the planner deal with post-scan/join query steps by generating and comparing Paths, replacing a lot of ad-hoc logic (Tom Lane)
This change provides only marginal user-visible improvements today, but it enables future work on a lot of upper-planner improvements that were impractical to tackle using the old code structure.
Support partial aggregation (David Rowley, Simon Riggs)
This change allows the computation of an aggregate function to be split into separate parts, for example so that parallel worker processes can cooperate on computing an aggregate. In future it might allow aggregation across local and remote data to occur partially on the remote end.
Add a generic command progress reporting facility (Vinayak Pokale, Rahila Syed, Amit Langote, Robert Haas)
Separate out psql's flex lexer to make it usable by other client programs (Tom Lane, Kyotaro Horiguchi)
This eliminates code duplication for programs that need to be able to parse SQL commands well enough to identify command boundaries. Doing that in full generality is more painful than one could wish, and up to now only psql has really gotten it right among our supported client programs.
A new source-code subdirectory src/fe_utils/ has been created to hold this and other code that is shared across our client programs. Formerly such sharing was accomplished by symbolic linking or copying source files at build time, which was ugly and required duplicate compilation.
Introduce WaitEventSet API to allow efficient waiting for event sets that usually do not change from one wait to the next (Andres Freund, Amit Kapila)
Add a generic interface for writing WAL records (Alexander Korotkov, Petr Jelínek, Markus Nullmeier)
This change allows extensions to write WAL records for changes to pages using a standard layout. The problem of needing to replay WAL without access to the extension is solved by having generic replay code. This allows extensions to implement, for example, index access methods and have WAL support for them.
Support generic WAL messages for logical decoding (Petr Jelínek, Andres Freund)
This feature allows extensions to insert data into the WAL stream that can be read by logical-decoding plugins, but is not connected to physical data restoration.
Allow SP-GiST operator classes to store an arbitrary "traversal value" while descending the index (Alexander Lebedev, Teodor Sigaev)
This is somewhat like the "reconstructed value", but it could be any arbitrary chunk of data, not necessarily of the same data type as the indexed column.
Introduce a LOG_SERVER_ONLY message level for ereport() (David Steele)
This level acts like LOG except that the message is never sent to the client. It is meant for use in auditing and similar applications.
Provide a Makefile target to build all generated headers (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
submake-generated-headers can now be invoked to ensure that generated backend header files are up-to-date. This is useful in subdirectories that might be built "standalone".
Support OpenSSL 1.1.0 (Andreas Karlsson, Heikki Linnakangas)
Add configuration parameter auto_explain.sample_rate to allow contrib/auto_explain to capture just a configurable fraction of all queries (Craig Ringer, Julien Rouhaud)
This allows reduction of overhead for heavy query traffic, while still getting useful information on average.
Add contrib/bloom module that implements an index access method based on Bloom filtering (Teodor Sigaev, Alexander Korotkov)
This is primarily a proof-of-concept for non-core index access methods, but it could be useful in its own right for queries that search many columns.
In contrib/cube, introduce distance operators for cubes, and support kNN-style searches in GiST indexes on cube columns (Stas Kelvich)
Make contrib/hstore's hstore_to_jsonb_loose() and hstore_to_json_loose() functions agree on what is a number (Tom Lane)
Previously, hstore_to_jsonb_loose() would convert numeric-looking strings to JSON numbers, rather than strings, even if they did not exactly match the JSON syntax specification for numbers. This was inconsistent with hstore_to_json_loose(), so tighten the test to match the JSON syntax.
Add selectivity estimation functions for contrib/intarray operators to improve plans for queries using those operators (Yury Zhuravlev, Alexander Korotkov)
Make contrib/pageinspect's heap_page_items() function show the raw data in each tuple, and add new functions tuple_data_split() and heap_page_item_attrs() for inspection of individual tuple fields (Nikolay Shaplov)
Add an optional S2K iteration count parameter to contrib/pgcrypto's pgp_sym_encrypt() function (Jeff Janes)
Add support for "word similarity" to contrib/pg_trgm (Alexander Korotkov, Artur Zakirov)
These functions and operators measure the similarity between one string and the most similar single word of another string.
Add configuration parameter pg_trgm.similarity_threshold for contrib/pg_trgm's similarity threshold (Artur Zakirov)
This threshold has always been configurable, but formerly it was controlled by special-purpose functions set_limit() and show_limit(). Those are now deprecated.
Improve contrib/pg_trgm's GIN operator class to speed up index searches in which both common and rare keys appear (Jeff Janes)
Improve performance of similarity searches in contrib/pg_trgm GIN indexes (Christophe Fornaroli)
Add contrib/pg_visibility module to allow examining table visibility maps (Robert Haas)
Add ssl_extension_info() function to contrib/sslinfo, to print information about SSL extensions present in the X509 certificate used for the current connection (Dmitry Voronin)
Allow extension-provided operators and functions to be sent for remote execution, if the extension is whitelisted in the foreign server's options (Paul Ramsey)
Users can enable this feature when the extension is known to exist in a compatible version in the remote database. It allows more efficient execution of queries involving extension operators.
Consider performing sorts on the remote server (Ashutosh Bapat)
Consider performing joins on the remote server (Shigeru Hanada, Ashutosh Bapat)
When feasible, perform UPDATE or DELETE entirely on the remote server (Etsuro Fujita)
Formerly, remote updates involved sending a SELECT FOR UPDATE command and then updating or deleting the selected rows one-by-one. While that is still necessary if the operation requires any local processing, it can now be done remotely if all elements of the query are safe to send to the remote server.
Allow the fetch size to be set as a server or table option (Corey Huinker)
Formerly, postgres_fdw always fetched 100 rows at a time from remote queries; now that behavior is configurable.
Use a single foreign-server connection for local user IDs that all map to the same remote user (Ashutosh Bapat)
Transmit query cancellation requests to the remote server (Michael Paquier, Etsuro Fujita)
Previously, a local query cancellation request did not cause an already-sent remote query to terminate early.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.1 released on 2016-10-27 - docs
Fix WAL-logging of truncation of relation free space maps and visibility maps (Pavan Deolasee, Heikki Linnakangas)
It was possible for these files to not be correctly restored during crash recovery, or to be written incorrectly on a standby server. Bogus entries in a free space map could lead to attempts to access pages that have been truncated away from the relation itself, typically producing errors like "could not read block XXX: read only 0 of 8192 bytes". Checksum failures in the visibility map are also possible, if checksumming is enabled.
Procedures for determining whether there is a problem and repairing it if so are discussed at https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Free_Space_Map_Problems.
Fix possible data corruption when pg_upgrade rewrites a relation visibility map into 9.6 format (Tom Lane)
On big-endian machines, bytes of the new visibility map were written in the wrong order, leading to a completely incorrect map. On Windows, the old map was read using text mode, leading to incorrect results if the map happened to contain consecutive bytes that matched a carriage return/line feed sequence. The latter error would almost always lead to a pg_upgrade failure due to the map file appearing to be the wrong length.
If you are using a big-endian machine (many non-Intel architectures are big-endian) and have used pg_upgrade to upgrade from a pre-9.6 release, you should assume that all visibility maps are incorrect and need to be regenerated. It is sufficient to truncate each relation's visibility map with contrib/pg_visibility's pg_truncate_visibility_map() function. For more information see https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Visibility_Map_Problems.
Don't throw serialization errors for self-conflicting insertions in INSERT ... ON CONFLICT (Thomas Munro, Peter Geoghegan)
Fix use-after-free hazard in execution of aggregate functions using DISTINCT (Peter Geoghegan)
This could lead to a crash or incorrect query results.
Fix incorrect handling of polymorphic aggregates used as window functions (Tom Lane)
The aggregate's transition function was told that its first argument and result were of the aggregate's output type, rather than the state type. This led to errors or crashes with polymorphic transition functions.
Fix COPY with a column name list from a table that has row-level security enabled (Adam Brightwell)
Fix EXPLAIN to emit valid XML when track_io_timing is on (Markus Winand)
Previously the XML output-format option produced syntactically invalid tags such as <I/O-Read-Time>. That is now rendered as <I-O-Read-Time>.
Fix statistics update for TRUNCATE in a prepared transaction (Stas Kelvich)
Fix bugs in merging inherited CHECK constraints while creating or altering a table (Tom Lane, Amit Langote)
Allow identical CHECK constraints to be added to a parent and child table in either order. Prevent merging of a valid constraint from the parent table with a NOT VALID constraint on the child. Likewise, prevent merging of a NO INHERIT child constraint with an inherited constraint.
Show a sensible value in pg_settings.unit for min_wal_size and max_wal_size (Tom Lane)
Fix replacement of array elements in jsonb_set() (Tom Lane)
If the target is an existing JSON array element, it got deleted instead of being replaced with a new value.
Avoid very-low-probability data corruption due to testing tuple visibility without holding buffer lock (Thomas Munro, Peter Geoghegan, Tom Lane)
Preserve commit timestamps across server restart (Julien Rouhaud, Craig Ringer)
With track_commit_timestamp turned on, old commit timestamps became inaccessible after a clean server restart.
Fix logical WAL decoding to work properly when a subtransaction's WAL output is large enough to spill to disk (Andres Freund)
Fix dangling-pointer problem in logical WAL decoding (Stas Kelvich)
Round shared-memory allocation request to a multiple of the actual huge page size when attempting to use huge pages on Linux (Tom Lane)
This avoids possible failures during munmap() on systems with atypical default huge page sizes. Except in crash-recovery cases, there were no ill effects other than a log message.
Don't try to share SSL contexts across multiple connections in libpq (Heikki Linnakangas)
This led to assorted corner-case bugs, particularly when trying to use different SSL parameters for different connections.
Avoid corner-case memory leak in libpq (Tom Lane)
The reported problem involved leaking an error report during PQreset(), but there might be related cases.
In pg_upgrade, check library loadability in name order (Tom Lane)
This is a workaround to deal with cross-extension dependencies from language transform modules to their base language and data type modules.
Fix pg_upgrade to work correctly for extensions containing index access methods (Tom Lane)
To allow this, the server has been extended to support ALTER EXTENSION ADD/DROP ACCESS METHOD. That functionality should have been included in the original patch to support dynamic creation of access methods, but it was overlooked.
Improve error reporting in pg_upgrade's file copying/linking/rewriting steps (Tom Lane, Álvaro Herrera)
Fix pg_dump to work against pre-7.4 servers (Amit Langote, Tom Lane)
Disallow specifying both --source-server and --source-target options to pg_rewind (Michael Banck)
Make pg_rewind turn off synchronous_commit in its session on the source server (Michael Banck, Michael Paquier)
This allows pg_rewind to work even when the source server is using synchronous replication that is not working for some reason.
In pg_xlogdump, retry opening new WAL segments when using --follow option (Magnus Hagander)
This allows for a possible delay in the server's creation of the next segment.
Fix contrib/pg_visibility to report the correct TID for a corrupt tuple that has been the subject of a rolled-back update (Tom Lane)
Fix makefile dependencies so that parallel make of PL/Python by itself will succeed reliably (Pavel Raiskup)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2016h for DST law changes in Palestine and Turkey, plus historical corrections for Turkey and some regions of Russia. Switch to numeric abbreviations for some time zones in Antarctica, the former Soviet Union, and Sri Lanka.
The IANA time zone database previously provided textual abbreviations for all time zones, sometimes making up abbreviations that have little or no currency among the local population. They are in process of reversing that policy in favor of using numeric UTC offsets in zones where there is no evidence of real-world use of an English abbreviation. At least for the time being, PostgreSQL will continue to accept such removed abbreviations for timestamp input. But they will not be shown in the pg_timezone_names view nor used for output.
In this update, AMT is no longer shown as being in use to mean Armenia Time. Therefore, we have changed the Default abbreviation set to interpret it as Amazon Time, thus UTC-4 not UTC+4.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.2 released on 2017-02-09 - docs
Fix a race condition that could cause indexes built with CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY to be corrupt (Pavan Deolasee, Tom Lane)
If CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY was used to build an index that depends on a column not previously indexed, then rows updated by transactions that ran concurrently with the CREATE INDEX command could have received incorrect index entries. If you suspect this may have happened, the most reliable solution is to rebuild affected indexes after installing this update.
Ensure that the special snapshot used for catalog scans is not invalidated by premature data pruning (Tom Lane)
Backends failed to account for this snapshot when advertising their oldest xmin, potentially allowing concurrent vacuuming operations to remove data that was still needed. This led to transient failures along the lines of "cache lookup failed for relation 1255".
Fix incorrect WAL logging for BRIN indexes (Kuntal Ghosh)
The WAL record emitted for a BRIN "revmap" page when moving an index tuple to a different page was incorrect. Replay would make the related portion of the index useless, forcing it to be recomputed.
Unconditionally WAL-log creation of the "init fork" for an unlogged table (Michael Paquier)
Previously, this was skipped when wal_level = minimal, but actually it's necessary even in that case to ensure that the unlogged table is properly reset to empty after a crash.
If the stats collector dies during hot standby, restart it (Takayuki Tsunakawa)
Ensure that hot standby feedback works correctly when it's enabled at standby server start (Ants Aasma, Craig Ringer)
Check for interrupts while hot standby is waiting for a conflicting query (Simon Riggs)
Avoid constantly respawning the autovacuum launcher in a corner case (Amit Khandekar)
This fix avoids problems when autovacuum is nominally off and there are some tables that require freezing, but all such tables are already being processed by autovacuum workers.
Disallow setting the num_sync field to zero in synchronous_standby_names (Fujii Masao)
The correct way to disable synchronous standby is to set the whole value to an empty string.
Don't count background worker processes against a user's connection limit (David Rowley)
Fix check for when an extension member object can be dropped (Tom Lane)
Extension upgrade scripts should be able to drop member objects, but this was disallowed for serial-column sequences, and possibly other cases.
Fix tracking of initial privileges for extension member objects so that it works correctly with ALTER EXTENSION ... ADD/DROP (Stephen Frost)
An object's current privileges at the time it is added to the extension will now be considered its default privileges; only later changes in its privileges will be dumped by subsequent pg_dump runs.
Make sure ALTER TABLE preserves index tablespace assignments when rebuilding indexes (Tom Lane, Michael Paquier)
Previously, non-default settings of default_tablespace could result in broken indexes.
Fix incorrect updating of trigger function properties when changing a foreign-key constraint's deferrability properties with ALTER TABLE ... ALTER CONSTRAINT (Tom Lane)
This led to odd failures during subsequent exercise of the foreign key, as the triggers were fired at the wrong times.
Prevent dropping a foreign-key constraint if there are pending trigger events for the referenced relation (Tom Lane)
This avoids "could not find trigger NNN" or "relation NNN has no triggers" errors.
Fix ALTER TABLE ... SET DATA TYPE ... USING when child table has different column ordering than the parent (Álvaro Herrera)
Failure to adjust the column numbering in the USING expression led to errors, typically "attribute N has wrong type".
Fix processing of OID column when a table with OIDs is associated to a parent with OIDs via ALTER TABLE ... INHERIT (Amit Langote)
The OID column should be treated the same as regular user columns in this case, but it wasn't, leading to odd behavior in later inheritance changes.
Ensure that CREATE TABLE ... LIKE ... WITH OIDS creates a table with OIDs, whether or not the LIKE-referenced table(s) have OIDs (Tom Lane)
Fix CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW to update the view query before attempting to apply the new view options (Dean Rasheed)
Previously the command would fail if the new options were inconsistent with the old view definition.
Report correct object identity during ALTER TEXT SEARCH CONFIGURATION (Artur Zakirov)
The wrong catalog OID was reported to extensions such as logical decoding.
Fix commit timestamp mechanism to not fail when queried about the special XIDs FrozenTransactionId and BootstrapTransactionId (Craig Ringer)
Fix incorrect use of view reloptions as regular table reloptions (Tom Lane)
The symptom was spurious "ON CONFLICT is not supported on table ... used as a catalog table" errors when the target of INSERT ... ON CONFLICT is a view with cascade option.
Fix incorrect "target lists can have at most N entries" complaint when using ON CONFLICT with wide tables (Tom Lane)
Fix spurious "query provides a value for a dropped column" errors during INSERT or UPDATE on a table with a dropped column (Tom Lane)
Prevent multicolumn expansion of foo.* in an UPDATE source expression (Tom Lane)
This led to "UPDATE target count mismatch --- internal error". Now the syntax is understood as a whole-row variable, as it would be in other contexts.
Ensure that column typmods are determined accurately for multi-row VALUES constructs (Tom Lane)
This fixes problems occurring when the first value in a column has a determinable typmod (e.g., length for a varchar value) but later values don't share the same limit.
Throw error for an unfinished Unicode surrogate pair at the end of a Unicode string (Tom Lane)
Normally, a Unicode surrogate leading character must be followed by a Unicode surrogate trailing character, but the check for this was missed if the leading character was the last character in a Unicode string literal (U&'...') or Unicode identifier (U&"...").
Fix execution of DISTINCT and ordered aggregates when multiple such aggregates are able to share the same transition state (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix implementation of phrase search operators in tsquery (Tom Lane)
Remove incorrect, and inconsistently-applied, rewrite rules that tried to transform away AND/OR/NOT operators appearing below a PHRASE operator; instead upgrade the execution engine to handle such cases correctly. This fixes assorted strange behavior and possible crashes for text search queries containing such combinations. Also fix nested PHRASE operators to work sanely in combinations other than simple left-deep trees, correct the behavior when removing stopwords from a phrase search clause, and make sure that index searches behave consistently with simple sequential-scan application of such queries.
Ensure that a purely negative text search query, such as !foo, matches empty tsvectors (Tom Dunstan)
Such matches were found by GIN index searches, but not by sequential scans or GiST index searches.
Prevent crash when ts_rewrite() replaces a non-top-level subtree with an empty query (Artur Zakirov)
Fix performance problems in ts_rewrite() (Tom Lane)
Fix ts_rewrite()'s handling of nested NOT operators (Tom Lane)
Improve speed of user-defined aggregates that use array_append() as transition function (Tom Lane)
Fix array_fill() to handle empty arrays properly (Tom Lane)
Fix possible crash in array_position() or array_positions() when processing arrays of records (Junseok Yang)
Fix one-byte buffer overrun in quote_literal_cstr() (Heikki Linnakangas)
The overrun occurred only if the input consisted entirely of single quotes and/or backslashes.
Prevent multiple calls of pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup() from running concurrently (Michael Paquier)
This avoids an assertion failure, and possibly worse things, if someone tries to run these functions in parallel.
Disable transform that attempted to remove no-op AT TIME ZONE conversions (Tom Lane)
This resulted in wrong answers when the simplified expression was used in an index condition.
Avoid discarding interval-to-interval casts that aren't really no-ops (Tom Lane)
In some cases, a cast that should result in zeroing out low-order interval fields was mistakenly deemed to be a no-op and discarded. An example is that casting from INTERVAL MONTH to INTERVAL YEAR failed to clear the months field.
Fix crash if the number of workers available to a parallel query decreases during a rescan (Andreas Seltenreich)
Fix bugs in transmitting GUC parameter values to parallel workers (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
Allow statements prepared with PREPARE to be given parallel plans (Amit Kapila, Tobias Bussmann)
Fix incorrect generation of parallel plans for semi-joins (Tom Lane)
Fix planner's cardinality estimates for parallel joins (Robert Haas)
Ensure that these estimates reflect the number of rows predicted to be seen by each worker, rather than the total.
Fix planner to avoid trying to parallelize plan nodes containing initplans or subplans (Tom Lane, Amit Kapila)
Ensure that cached plans are invalidated by changes in foreign-table options (Amit Langote, Etsuro Fujita, Ashutosh Bapat)
Fix the plan generated for sorted partial aggregation with a constant GROUP BY clause (Tom Lane)
Fix "could not find plan for CTE" planner error when dealing with a UNION ALL containing CTE references (Tom Lane)
Fix mishandling of initplans when forcibly adding a Material node to a subplan (Tom Lane)
The typical consequence of this mistake was a "plan should not reference subplan's variable" error.
Fix foreign-key-based join selectivity estimation for semi-joins and anti-joins, as well as inheritance cases (Tom Lane)
The new code for taking the existence of a foreign key relationship into account did the wrong thing in these cases, making the estimates worse not better than the pre-9.6 code.
Fix pg_dump to emit the data of a sequence that is marked as an extension configuration table (Michael Paquier)
Fix mishandling of ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES ... REVOKE in pg_dump (Stephen Frost)
pg_dump missed issuing the required REVOKE commands in cases where ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES had been used to reduce privileges to less than they would normally be.
Fix pg_dump to dump user-defined casts and transforms that use built-in functions (Stephen Frost)
Fix pg_restore with --create --if-exists to behave more sanely if an archive contains unrecognized DROP commands (Tom Lane)
This doesn't fix any live bug, but it may improve the behavior in future if pg_restore is used with an archive generated by a later pg_dump version.
Fix pg_basebackup's rate limiting in the presence of slow I/O (Antonin Houska)
If disk I/O was transiently much slower than the specified rate limit, the calculation overflowed, effectively disabling the rate limit for the rest of the run.
Fix pg_basebackup's handling of symlinked pg_stat_tmp and pg_replslot subdirectories (Magnus Hagander, Michael Paquier)
Fix possible pg_basebackup failure on standby server when including WAL files (Amit Kapila, Robert Haas)
Improve initdb to insert the correct platform-specific default values for the xxx_flush_after parameters into postgresql.conf (Fabien Coelho, Tom Lane)
This is a cleaner way of documenting the default values than was used previously.
Fix possible mishandling of expanded arrays in domain check constraints and CASE execution (Tom Lane)
It was possible for a PL/pgSQL function invoked in these contexts to modify or even delete an array value that needs to be preserved for additional operations.
Fix nested uses of PL/pgSQL functions in contexts such as domain check constraints evaluated during assignment to a PL/pgSQL variable (Tom Lane)
Ensure that the Python exception objects we create for PL/Python are properly reference-counted (Rafa de la Torre, Tom Lane)
This avoids failures if the objects are used after a Python garbage collection cycle has occurred.
Fix PL/Tcl to support triggers on tables that have .tupno as a column name (Tom Lane)
This matches the (previously undocumented) behavior of PL/Tcl's spi_exec and spi_execp commands, namely that a magic .tupno column is inserted only if there isn't a real column named that.
Allow DOS-style line endings in ~/.pgpass files, even on Unix (Vik Fearing)
This change simplifies use of the same password file across Unix and Windows machines.
Fix one-byte buffer overrun if ecpg is given a file name that ends with a dot (Takayuki Tsunakawa)
Fix incorrect error reporting for duplicate data in psql's \crosstabview (Tom Lane)
psql sometimes quoted the wrong row and/or column values when complaining about multiple entries for the same crosstab cell.
Fix psql's tab completion for ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES (Gilles Darold, Stephen Frost)
Fix psql's tab completion for ALTER TABLE t ALTER c DROP ... (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
In psql, treat an empty or all-blank setting of the PAGER environment variable as meaning "no pager" (Tom Lane)
Previously, such a setting caused output intended for the pager to vanish entirely.
Improve contrib/dblink's reporting of low-level libpq errors, such as out-of-memory (Joe Conway)
Teach contrib/dblink to ignore irrelevant server options when it uses a contrib/postgres_fdw foreign server as the source of connection options (Corey Huinker)
Previously, if the foreign server object had options that were not also libpq connection options, an error occurred.
Fix portability problems in contrib/pageinspect's functions for GIN indexes (Peter Eisentraut, Tom Lane)
Fix possible miss of socket read events while waiting on Windows (Amit Kapila)
This error was harmless for most uses, but it is known to cause hangs when trying to use the pldebugger extension.
On Windows, ensure that environment variable changes are propagated to DLLs built with debug options (Christian Ullrich)
Sync our copy of the timezone library with IANA release tzcode2016j (Tom Lane)
This fixes various issues, most notably that timezone data installation failed if the target directory didn't support hard links.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2016j for DST law changes in northern Cyprus (adding a new zone Asia/Famagusta), Russia (adding a new zone Europe/Saratov), Tonga, and Antarctica/Casey. Historical corrections for Italy, Kazakhstan, Malta, and Palestine. Switch to preferring numeric zone abbreviations for Tonga.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.3 released on 2017-05-11 - docs
Restrict visibility of pg_user_mappings.umoptions, to protect passwords stored as user mapping options (Michael Paquier, Feike Steenbergen)
The previous coding allowed the owner of a foreign server object, or anyone he has granted server USAGE permission to, to see the options for all user mappings associated with that server. This might well include passwords for other users. Adjust the view definition to match the behavior of information_schema.user_mapping_options, namely that these options are visible to the user being mapped, or if the mapping is for PUBLIC and the current user is the server owner, or if the current user is a superuser. (CVE-2017-7486)
By itself, this patch will only fix the behavior in newly initdb'd databases. If you wish to apply this change in an existing database, follow the corrected procedure shown in the changelog entry for CVE-2017-7547, in Section E.13.
Prevent exposure of statistical information via leaky operators (Peter Eisentraut)
Some selectivity estimation functions in the planner will apply user-defined operators to values obtained from pg_statistic, such as most common values and histogram entries. This occurs before table permissions are checked, so a nefarious user could exploit the behavior to obtain these values for table columns he does not have permission to read. To fix, fall back to a default estimate if the operator's implementation function is not certified leak-proof and the calling user does not have permission to read the table column whose statistics are needed. At least one of these criteria is satisfied in most cases in practice. (CVE-2017-7484)
Restore libpq's recognition of the PGREQUIRESSL environment variable (Daniel Gustafsson)
Processing of this environment variable was unintentionally dropped in PostgreSQL 9.3, but its documentation remained. This creates a security hazard, since users might be relying on the environment variable to force SSL-encrypted connections, but that would no longer be guaranteed. Restore handling of the variable, but give it lower priority than PGSSLMODE, to avoid breaking configurations that work correctly with post-9.3 code. (CVE-2017-7485)
Fix possibly-invalid initial snapshot during logical decoding (Petr Jelinek, Andres Freund)
The initial snapshot created for a logical decoding replication slot was potentially incorrect. This could cause third-party tools that use logical decoding to copy incomplete/inconsistent initial data. This was more likely to happen if the source server was busy at the time of slot creation, or if another logical slot already existed.
If you are using a replication tool that depends on logical decoding, and it should have copied a nonempty data set at the start of replication, it is advisable to recreate the replica after installing this update, or to verify its contents against the source server.
Fix possible corruption of "init forks" of unlogged indexes (Robert Haas, Michael Paquier)
This could result in an unlogged index being set to an invalid state after a crash and restart. Such a problem would persist until the index was dropped and rebuilt.
Fix incorrect reconstruction of pg_subtrans entries when a standby server replays a prepared but uncommitted two-phase transaction (Tom Lane)
In most cases this turned out to have no visible ill effects, but in corner cases it could result in circular references in pg_subtrans, potentially causing infinite loops in queries that examine rows modified by the two-phase transaction.
Avoid possible crash in walsender due to failure to initialize a string buffer (Stas Kelvich, Fujii Masao)
Fix possible crash when rescanning a nearest-neighbor index-only scan on a GiST index (Tom Lane)
Prevent delays in postmaster's launching of multiple parallel worker processes (Tom Lane)
There could be a significant delay (up to tens of seconds) before satisfying a query's request for more than one worker process, or when multiple queries requested workers simultaneously. On most platforms this required unlucky timing, but on some it was the typical case.
Fix postmaster's handling of fork() failure for a background worker process (Tom Lane)
Previously, the postmaster updated portions of its state as though the process had been launched successfully, resulting in subsequent confusion.
Fix possible "no relation entry for relid 0" error when planning nested set operations (Tom Lane)
Fix assorted minor issues in planning of parallel queries (Robert Haas)
Avoid applying "physical targetlist" optimization to custom scans (Dmitry Ivanov, Tom Lane)
This optimization supposed that retrieving all columns of a tuple is inexpensive, which is true for ordinary Postgres tuples; but it might not be the case for a custom scan provider.
Use the correct sub-expression when applying a FOR ALL row-level-security policy (Stephen Frost)
In some cases the WITH CHECK restriction would be applied when the USING restriction is more appropriate.
Ensure parsing of queries in extension scripts sees the results of immediately-preceding DDL (Julien Rouhaud, Tom Lane)
Due to lack of a cache flush step between commands in an extension script file, non-utility queries might not see the effects of an immediately preceding catalog change, such as ALTER TABLE ... RENAME.
Skip tablespace privilege checks when ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN TYPE rebuilds an existing index (Noah Misch)
The command failed if the calling user did not currently have CREATE privilege for the tablespace containing the index. That behavior seems unhelpful, so skip the check, allowing the index to be rebuilt where it is.
Fix ALTER TABLE ... VALIDATE CONSTRAINT to not recurse to child tables when the constraint is marked NO INHERIT (Amit Langote)
This fix prevents unwanted "constraint does not exist" failures when no matching constraint is present in the child tables.
Avoid dangling pointer in COPY ... TO when row-level security is active for the source table (Tom Lane)
Usually this had no ill effects, but sometimes it would cause unexpected errors or crashes.
Avoid accessing an already-closed relcache entry in CLUSTER and VACUUM FULL (Tom Lane)
With some bad luck, this could lead to indexes on the target relation getting rebuilt with the wrong persistence setting.
Fix VACUUM to account properly for pages that could not be scanned due to conflicting page pins (Andrew Gierth)
This tended to lead to underestimation of the number of tuples in the table. In the worst case of a small heavily-contended table, VACUUM could incorrectly report that the table contained no tuples, leading to very bad planning choices.
Ensure that bulk-tuple-transfer loops within a hash join are interruptible by query cancel requests (Tom Lane, Thomas Munro)
Fix incorrect support for certain box operators in SP-GiST (Nikita Glukhov)
SP-GiST index scans using the operators &< &> &<| and |&> would yield incorrect answers.
Fix integer-overflow problems in interval comparison (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Tom Lane)
The comparison operators for type interval could yield wrong answers for intervals larger than about 296000 years. Indexes on columns containing such large values should be reindexed, since they may be corrupt.
Fix cursor_to_xml() to produce valid output with tableforest = false (Thomas Munro, Peter Eisentraut)
Previously it failed to produce a wrapping <table> element.
Fix roundoff problems in float8_timestamptz() and make_interval() (Tom Lane)
These functions truncated, rather than rounded, when converting a floating-point value to integer microseconds; that could cause unexpectedly off-by-one results.
Fix pg_get_object_address() to handle members of operator families correctly (Álvaro Herrera)
Fix cancelling of pg_stop_backup() when attempting to stop a non-exclusive backup (Michael Paquier, David Steele)
If pg_stop_backup() was cancelled while waiting for a non-exclusive backup to end, related state was left inconsistent; a new exclusive backup could not be started, and there were other minor problems.
Improve performance of pg_timezone_names view (Tom Lane, David Rowley)
Reduce memory management overhead for contexts containing many large blocks (Tom Lane)
Fix sloppy handling of corner-case errors from lseek() and close() (Tom Lane)
Neither of these system calls are likely to fail in typical situations, but if they did, fd.c could get quite confused.
Fix incorrect check for whether postmaster is running as a Windows service (Michael Paquier)
This could result in attempting to write to the event log when that isn't accessible, so that no logging happens at all.
Fix ecpg to support COMMIT PREPARED and ROLLBACK PREPARED (Masahiko Sawada)
Fix a double-free error when processing dollar-quoted string literals in ecpg (Michael Meskes)
Fix pgbench to handle the combination of --connect and --rate options correctly (Fabien Coelho)
Fix pgbench to honor the long-form option spelling --builtin, as per its documentation (Tom Lane)
Fix pg_dump/pg_restore to correctly handle privileges for the public schema when using --clean option (Stephen Frost)
Other schemas start out with no privileges granted, but public does not; this requires special-case treatment when it is dropped and restored due to the --clean option.
In pg_dump, fix incorrect schema and owner marking for comments and security labels of some types of database objects (Giuseppe Broccolo, Tom Lane)
In simple cases this caused no ill effects; but for example, a schema-selective restore might omit comments it should include, because they were not marked as belonging to the schema of their associated object.
Fix typo in pg_dump's query for initial privileges of a procedural language (Peter Eisentraut)
This resulted in pg_dump always believing that the language had no initial privileges. Since that's true for most procedural languages, ill effects from this bug are probably rare.
Avoid emitting an invalid list file in pg_restore -l when SQL object names contain newlines (Tom Lane)
Replace newlines by spaces, which is sufficient to make the output valid for pg_restore -L's purposes.
Fix pg_upgrade to transfer comments and security labels attached to "large objects" (blobs) (Stephen Frost)
Previously, blobs were correctly transferred to the new database, but any comments or security labels attached to them were lost.
Improve error handling in contrib/adminpack's pg_file_write() function (Noah Misch)
Notably, it failed to detect errors reported by fclose().
In contrib/dblink, avoid leaking the previous unnamed connection when establishing a new unnamed connection (Joe Conway)
Fix contrib/pg_trgm's extraction of trigrams from regular expressions (Tom Lane)
In some cases it would produce a broken data structure that could never match anything, leading to GIN or GiST indexscans that use a trigram index not finding any matches to the regular expression.
In contrib/postgres_fdw, allow join conditions that contain shippable extension-provided functions to be pushed to the remote server (David Rowley, Ashutosh Bapat)
Support Tcl 8.6 in MSVC builds (Álvaro Herrera)
Sync our copy of the timezone library with IANA release tzcode2017b (Tom Lane)
This fixes a bug affecting some DST transitions in January 2038.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2017b for DST law changes in Chile, Haiti, and Mongolia, plus historical corrections for Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Liberia, and Spain. Switch to numeric abbreviations for numerous time zones in South America, the Pacific and Indian oceans, and some Asian and Middle Eastern countries.
The IANA time zone database previously provided textual abbreviations for all time zones, sometimes making up abbreviations that have little or no currency among the local population. They are in process of reversing that policy in favor of using numeric UTC offsets in zones where there is no evidence of real-world use of an English abbreviation. At least for the time being, PostgreSQL will continue to accept such removed abbreviations for timestamp input. But they will not be shown in the pg_timezone_names view nor used for output.
Use correct daylight-savings rules for POSIX-style time zone names in MSVC builds (David Rowley)
The Microsoft MSVC build scripts neglected to install the posixrules file in the timezone directory tree. This resulted in the timezone code falling back to its built-in rule about what DST behavior to assume for a POSIX-style time zone name. For historical reasons that still corresponds to the DST rules the USA was using before 2007 (i.e., change on first Sunday in April and last Sunday in October). With this fix, a POSIX-style zone name will use the current and historical DST transition dates of the US/Eastern zone. If you don't want that, remove the posixrules file, or replace it with a copy of some other zone file (see Section 8.5.3). Note that due to caching, you may need to restart the server to get such changes to take effect.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.4 released on 2017-08-10 - docs
Further restrict visibility of pg_user_mappings.umoptions, to protect passwords stored as user mapping options (Noah Misch)
The fix for CVE-2017-7486 was incorrect: it allowed a user to see the options in her own user mapping, even if she did not have USAGE permission on the associated foreign server. Such options might include a password that had been provided by the server owner rather than the user herself. Since information_schema.user_mapping_options does not show the options in such cases, pg_user_mappings should not either. (CVE-2017-7547)
By itself, this patch will only fix the behavior in newly initdb'd databases. If you wish to apply this change in an existing database, you will need to do the following:
Restart the postmaster after adding allow_system_table_mods = true to postgresql.conf. (In versions supporting ALTER SYSTEM, you can use that to make the configuration change, but you'll still need a restart.)
In each database of the cluster, run the following commands as superuser:
SET search_path = pg_catalog;
CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW pg_user_mappings AS
SELECT
U.oid AS umid,
S.oid AS srvid,
S.srvname AS srvname,
U.umuser AS umuser,
CASE WHEN U.umuser = 0 THEN
'public'
ELSE
A.rolname
END AS usename,
CASE WHEN (U.umuser <> 0 AND A.rolname = current_user
AND (pg_has_role(S.srvowner, 'USAGE')
OR has_server_privilege(S.oid, 'USAGE')))
OR (U.umuser = 0 AND pg_has_role(S.srvowner, 'USAGE'))
OR (SELECT rolsuper FROM pg_authid WHERE rolname = current_user)
THEN U.umoptions
ELSE NULL END AS umoptions
FROM pg_user_mapping U
LEFT JOIN pg_authid A ON (A.oid = U.umuser) JOIN
pg_foreign_server S ON (U.umserver = S.oid);Do not forget to include the template0 and template1 databases, or the vulnerability will still exist in databases you create later. To fix template0, you'll need to temporarily make it accept connections. In PostgreSQL 9.5 and later, you can use
ALTER DATABASE template0 WITH ALLOW_CONNECTIONS true;
and then after fixing template0, undo that with
ALTER DATABASE template0 WITH ALLOW_CONNECTIONS false;
In prior versions, instead use
UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = true WHERE datname = 'template0'; UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = false WHERE datname = 'template0';
Finally, remove the allow_system_table_mods configuration setting, and again restart the postmaster.
Disallow empty passwords in all password-based authentication methods (Heikki Linnakangas)
libpq ignores empty password specifications, and does not transmit them to the server. So, if a user's password has been set to the empty string, it's impossible to log in with that password via psql or other libpq-based clients. An administrator might therefore believe that setting the password to empty is equivalent to disabling password login. However, with a modified or non-libpq-based client, logging in could be possible, depending on which authentication method is configured. In particular the most common method, md5, accepted empty passwords. Change the server to reject empty passwords in all cases. (CVE-2017-7546)
Make lo_put() check for UPDATE privilege on the target large object (Tom Lane, Michael Paquier)
lo_put() should surely require the same permissions as lowrite(), but the check was missing, allowing any user to change the data in a large object. (CVE-2017-7548)
Correct the documentation about the process for upgrading standby servers with pg_upgrade (Bruce Momjian)
The previous documentation instructed users to start/stop the primary server after running pg_upgrade but before syncing the standby servers. This sequence is unsafe.
Fix concurrent locking of tuple update chains (Álvaro Herrera)
If several sessions concurrently lock a tuple update chain with nonconflicting lock modes using an old snapshot, and they all succeed, it was possible for some of them to nonetheless fail (and conclude there is no live tuple version) due to a race condition. This had consequences such as foreign-key checks failing to see a tuple that definitely exists but is being updated concurrently.
Fix potential data corruption when freezing a tuple whose XMAX is a multixact with exactly one still-interesting member (Teodor Sigaev)
Avoid integer overflow and ensuing crash when sorting more than one billion tuples in-memory (Sergey Koposov)
On Windows, retry process creation if we fail to reserve the address range for our shared memory in the new process (Tom Lane, Amit Kapila)
This is expected to fix infrequent child-process-launch failures that are probably due to interference from antivirus products.
Fix low-probability corruption of shared predicate-lock hash table in Windows builds (Thomas Munro, Tom Lane)
Avoid logging clean closure of an SSL connection as though it were a connection reset (Michael Paquier)
Prevent sending SSL session tickets to clients (Tom Lane)
This fix prevents reconnection failures with ticket-aware client-side SSL code.
Fix code for setting tcp_keepalives_idle on Solaris (Tom Lane)
Fix statistics collector to honor inquiry messages issued just after a postmaster shutdown and immediate restart (Tom Lane)
Statistics inquiries issued within half a second of the previous postmaster shutdown were effectively ignored.
Ensure that the statistics collector's receive buffer size is at least 100KB (Tom Lane)
This reduces the risk of dropped statistics data on older platforms whose default receive buffer size is less than that.
Fix possible creation of an invalid WAL segment when a standby is promoted just after it processes an XLOG_SWITCH WAL record (Andres Freund)
Fix walsender to exit promptly when client requests shutdown (Tom Lane)
Fix SIGHUP and SIGUSR1 handling in walsender processes (Petr Jelinek, Andres Freund)
Prevent walsender-triggered panics during shutdown checkpoints (Andres Freund, Michael Paquier)
Fix unnecessarily slow restarts of walreceiver processes due to race condition in postmaster (Tom Lane)
Fix leakage of small subtransactions spilled to disk during logical decoding (Andres Freund)
This resulted in temporary files consuming excessive disk space.
Reduce the work needed to build snapshots during creation of logical-decoding slots (Andres Freund, Petr Jelinek)
The previous algorithm was infeasibly expensive on a server with a lot of open transactions.
Fix race condition that could indefinitely delay creation of logical-decoding slots (Andres Freund, Petr Jelinek)
Reduce overhead in processing syscache invalidation events (Tom Lane)
This is particularly helpful for logical decoding, which triggers frequent cache invalidation.
Remove incorrect heuristic used in some cases to estimate join selectivity based on the presence of foreign-key constraints (David Rowley)
In some cases where a multi-column foreign key constraint existed but did not exactly match a query's join structure, the planner used an estimation heuristic that turns out not to work well at all. Revert such cases to the way they were estimated before 9.6.
Fix cases where an INSERT or UPDATE assigns to more than one element of a column that is of domain-over-array type (Tom Lane)
Allow window functions to be used in sub-SELECTs that are within the arguments of an aggregate function (Tom Lane)
Ensure that a view's CHECK OPTIONS clause is enforced properly when the underlying table is a foreign table (Etsuro Fujita)
Previously, the update might get pushed entirely to the foreign server, but the need to verify the view conditions was missed if so.
Move autogenerated array types out of the way during ALTER ... RENAME (Vik Fearing)
Previously, we would rename a conflicting autogenerated array type out of the way during CREATE; this fix extends that behavior to renaming operations.
Fix dangling pointer in ALTER TABLE when there is a comment on a constraint belonging to the table (David Rowley)
Re-applying the comment to the reconstructed constraint could fail with a weird error message, or even crash.
Ensure that ALTER USER ... SET accepts all the syntax variants that ALTER ROLE ... SET does (Peter Eisentraut)
Allow a foreign table's CHECK constraints to be initially NOT VALID (Amit Langote)
CREATE TABLE silently drops NOT VALID specifiers for CHECK constraints, reasoning that the table must be empty so the constraint can be validated immediately. But this is wrong for CREATE FOREIGN TABLE, where there's no reason to suppose that the underlying table is empty, and even if it is it's no business of ours to decide that the constraint can be treated as valid going forward. Skip this "optimization" for foreign tables.
Properly update dependency info when changing a datatype I/O function's argument or return type from opaque to the correct type (Heikki Linnakangas)
CREATE TYPE updates I/O functions declared in this long-obsolete style, but it forgot to record a dependency on the type, allowing a subsequent DROP TYPE to leave broken function definitions behind.
Allow parallelism in the query plan when COPY copies from a query's result (Andres Freund)
Reduce memory usage when ANALYZE processes a tsvector column (Heikki Linnakangas)
Fix unnecessary precision loss and sloppy rounding when multiplying or dividing money values by integers or floats (Tom Lane)
Tighten checks for whitespace in functions that parse identifiers, such as regprocedurein() (Tom Lane)
Depending on the prevailing locale, these functions could misinterpret fragments of multibyte characters as whitespace.
Use relevant #define symbols from Perl while compiling PL/Perl (Ashutosh Sharma, Tom Lane)
This avoids portability problems, typically manifesting as a "handshake" mismatch during library load, when working with recent Perl versions.
In libpq, reset GSS/SASL and SSPI authentication state properly after a failed connection attempt (Michael Paquier)
Failure to do this meant that when falling back from SSL to non-SSL connections, a GSS/SASL failure in the SSL attempt would always cause the non-SSL attempt to fail. SSPI did not fail, but it leaked memory.
In psql, fix failure when COPY FROM STDIN is ended with a keyboard EOF signal and then another COPY FROM STDIN is attempted (Thomas Munro)
This misbehavior was observed on BSD-derived platforms (including macOS), but not on most others.
Fix pg_dump and pg_restore to emit REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW commands last (Tom Lane)
This prevents errors during dump/restore when a materialized view refers to tables owned by a different user.
Improve pg_dump/pg_restore's reporting of error conditions originating in zlib (Vladimir Kunschikov, Álvaro Herrera)
Fix pg_dump with the --clean option to drop event triggers as expected (Tom Lane)
It also now correctly assigns ownership of event triggers; before, they were restored as being owned by the superuser running the restore script.
Fix pg_dump with the --clean option to not fail when the public schema doesn't exist (Stephen Frost)
Fix pg_dump to not emit invalid SQL for an empty operator class (Daniel Gustafsson)
Fix pg_dump output to stdout on Windows (Kuntal Ghosh)
A compressed plain-text dump written to stdout would contain corrupt data due to failure to put the file descriptor into binary mode.
Fix pg_get_ruledef() to print correct output for the ON SELECT rule of a view whose columns have been renamed (Tom Lane)
In some corner cases, pg_dump relies on pg_get_ruledef() to dump views, so that this error could result in dump/reload failures.
Fix dumping of outer joins with empty constraints, such as the result of a NATURAL LEFT JOIN with no common columns (Tom Lane)
Fix dumping of function expressions in the FROM clause in cases where the expression does not deparse into something that looks like a function call (Tom Lane)
Fix pg_basebackup output to stdout on Windows (Haribabu Kommi)
A backup written to stdout would contain corrupt data due to failure to put the file descriptor into binary mode.
Fix pg_rewind to correctly handle files exceeding 2GB (Kuntal Ghosh, Michael Paquier)
Ordinarily such files won't appear in PostgreSQL data directories, but they could be present in some cases.
Fix pg_upgrade to ensure that the ending WAL record does not have wal_level = minimum (Bruce Momjian)
This condition could prevent upgraded standby servers from reconnecting.
Fix pg_xlogdump's computation of WAL record length (Andres Freund)
In postgres_fdw, re-establish connections to remote servers after ALTER SERVER or ALTER USER MAPPING commands (Kyotaro Horiguchi)
This ensures that option changes affecting connection parameters will be applied promptly.
In postgres_fdw, allow cancellation of remote transaction control commands (Robert Haas, Rafia Sabih)
This change allows us to quickly escape a wait for an unresponsive remote server in many more cases than previously.
Increase MAX_SYSCACHE_CALLBACKS to provide more room for extensions (Tom Lane)
Always use -fPIC, not -fpic, when building shared libraries with gcc (Tom Lane)
This supports larger extension libraries on platforms where it makes a difference.
In MSVC builds, handle the case where the openssl library is not within a VC subdirectory (Andrew Dunstan)
In MSVC builds, add proper include path for libxml2 header files (Andrew Dunstan)
This fixes a former need to move things around in standard Windows installations of libxml2.
In MSVC builds, recognize a Tcl library that is named tcl86.lib (Noah Misch)
In MSVC builds, honor PROVE_FLAGS settings on vcregress.pl's command line (Andrew Dunstan)
⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.5 released on 2017-08-31 - docs
Show foreign tables in information_schema.table_privileges view (Peter Eisentraut)
All other relevant information_schema views include foreign tables, but this one ignored them.
Since this view definition is installed by initdb, merely upgrading will not fix the problem. If you need to fix this in an existing installation, you can, as a superuser, do this in psql:
SET search_path TO information_schema;
CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW table_privileges AS
SELECT CAST(u_grantor.rolname AS sql_identifier) AS grantor,
CAST(grantee.rolname AS sql_identifier) AS grantee,
CAST(current_database() AS sql_identifier) AS table_catalog,
CAST(nc.nspname AS sql_identifier) AS table_schema,
CAST(c.relname AS sql_identifier) AS table_name,
CAST(c.prtype AS character_data) AS privilege_type,
CAST(
CASE WHEN
-- object owner always has grant options
pg_has_role(grantee.oid, c.relowner, 'USAGE')
OR c.grantable
THEN 'YES' ELSE 'NO' END AS yes_or_no) AS is_grantable,
CAST(CASE WHEN c.prtype = 'SELECT' THEN 'YES' ELSE 'NO' END AS yes_or_no) AS with_hierarchy
FROM (
SELECT oid, relname, relnamespace, relkind, relowner, (aclexplode(coalesce(relacl, acldefault('r', relowner)))).* FROM pg_class
) AS c (oid, relname, relnamespace, relkind, relowner, grantor, grantee, prtype, grantable),
pg_namespace nc,
pg_authid u_grantor,
(
SELECT oid, rolname FROM pg_authid
UNION ALL
SELECT 0::oid, 'PUBLIC'
) AS grantee (oid, rolname)
WHERE c.relnamespace = nc.oid
AND c.relkind IN ('r', 'v', 'f')
AND c.grantee = grantee.oid
AND c.grantor = u_grantor.oid
AND c.prtype IN ('INSERT', 'SELECT', 'UPDATE', 'DELETE', 'TRUNCATE', 'REFERENCES', 'TRIGGER')
AND (pg_has_role(u_grantor.oid, 'USAGE')
OR pg_has_role(grantee.oid, 'USAGE')
OR grantee.rolname = 'PUBLIC');This must be repeated in each database to be fixed, including template0.
Clean up handling of a fatal exit (e.g., due to receipt of SIGTERM) that occurs while trying to execute a ROLLBACK of a failed transaction (Tom Lane)
This situation could result in an assertion failure. In production builds, the exit would still occur, but it would log an unexpected message about "cannot drop active portal".
Remove assertion that could trigger during a fatal exit (Tom Lane)
Correctly identify columns that are of a range type or domain type over a composite type or domain type being searched for (Tom Lane)
Certain ALTER commands that change the definition of a composite type or domain type are supposed to fail if there are any stored values of that type in the database, because they lack the infrastructure needed to update or check such values. Previously, these checks could miss relevant values that are wrapped inside range types or sub-domains, possibly allowing the database to become inconsistent.
Prevent crash when passing fixed-length pass-by-reference data types to parallel worker processes (Tom Lane)
Fix crash in pg_restore when using parallel mode and using a list file to select a subset of items to restore (Fabrízio de Royes Mello)
Change ecpg's parser to allow RETURNING clauses without attached C variables (Michael Meskes)
This allows ecpg programs to contain SQL constructs that use RETURNING internally (for example, inside a CTE) rather than using it to define values to be returned to the client.
Change ecpg's parser to recognize backslash continuation of C preprocessor command lines (Michael Meskes)
Improve selection of compiler flags for PL/Perl on Windows (Tom Lane)
This fix avoids possible crashes of PL/Perl due to inconsistent assumptions about the width of time_t values. A side-effect that may be visible to extension developers is that _USE_32BIT_TIME_T is no longer defined globally in PostgreSQL Windows builds. This is not expected to cause problems, because type time_t is not used in any PostgreSQL API definitions.
Fix make check to behave correctly when invoked via a non-GNU make program (Thomas Munro)
⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.6 released on 2017-11-09 - docs
Ensure that INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE checks table permissions and RLS policies in all cases (Dean Rasheed)
The update path of INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE requires SELECT permission on the columns of the arbiter index, but it failed to check for that in the case of an arbiter specified by constraint name. In addition, for a table with row level security enabled, it failed to check updated rows against the table's SELECT policies (regardless of how the arbiter index was specified). (CVE-2017-15099)
Fix crash due to rowtype mismatch in json{b}_populate_recordset() (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
These functions used the result rowtype specified in the FROM ... AS clause without checking that it matched the actual rowtype of the supplied tuple value. If it didn't, that would usually result in a crash, though disclosure of server memory contents seems possible as well. (CVE-2017-15098)
Fix sample server-start scripts to become $PGUSER before opening $PGLOG (Noah Misch)
Previously, the postmaster log file was opened while still running as root. The database owner could therefore mount an attack against another system user by making $PGLOG be a symbolic link to some other file, which would then become corrupted by appending log messages.
By default, these scripts are not installed anywhere. Users who have made use of them will need to manually recopy them, or apply the same changes to their modified versions. If the existing $PGLOG file is root-owned, it will need to be removed or renamed out of the way before restarting the server with the corrected script. (CVE-2017-12172)
Fix BRIN index summarization to handle concurrent table extension correctly (Álvaro Herrera)
Previously, a race condition allowed some table rows to be omitted from the index. It may be necessary to reindex existing BRIN indexes to recover from past occurrences of this problem.
Fix possible failures during concurrent updates of a BRIN index (Tom Lane)
These race conditions could result in errors like "invalid index offnum" or "inconsistent range map".
Fix crash when logical decoding is invoked from a SPI-using function, in particular any function written in a PL language (Tom Lane)
Fix incorrect query results when multiple GROUPING SETS columns contain the same simple variable (Tom Lane)
Fix incorrect parallelization decisions for nested queries (Amit Kapila, Kuntal Ghosh)
Fix parallel query handling to not fail when a recently-used role is dropped (Amit Kapila)
Fix json_build_array(), json_build_object(), and their jsonb equivalents to handle explicit VARIADIC arguments correctly (Michael Paquier)
Properly reject attempts to convert infinite float values to type numeric (Tom Lane, KaiGai Kohei)
Previously the behavior was platform-dependent.
Fix corner-case crashes when columns have been added to the end of a view (Tom Lane)
Record proper dependencies when a view or rule contains FieldSelect or FieldStore expression nodes (Tom Lane)
Lack of these dependencies could allow a column or data type DROP to go through when it ought to fail, thereby causing later uses of the view or rule to get errors. This patch does not do anything to protect existing views/rules, only ones created in the future.
Correctly detect hashability of range data types (Tom Lane)
The planner mistakenly assumed that any range type could be hashed for use in hash joins or hash aggregation, but actually it must check whether the range's subtype has hash support. This does not affect any of the built-in range types, since they're all hashable anyway.
Correctly ignore RelabelType expression nodes when determining relation distinctness (David Rowley)
This allows the intended optimization to occur when a subquery has a result column of type varchar.
Prevent sharing transition states between ordered-set aggregates (David Rowley)
This causes a crash with the built-in ordered-set aggregates, and probably with user-written ones as well. v11 and later will include provisions for dealing with such cases safely, but in released branches, just disable the optimization.
Prevent idle_in_transaction_session_timeout from being ignored when a statement_timeout occurred earlier (Lukas Fittl)
Fix low-probability loss of NOTIFY messages due to XID wraparound (Marko Tiikkaja, Tom Lane)
If a session executed no queries, but merely listened for notifications, for more than 2 billion transactions, it started to miss some notifications from concurrently-committing transactions.
Avoid SIGBUS crash on Linux when a DSM memory request exceeds the space available in tmpfs (Thomas Munro)
Reduce the frequency of data flush requests during bulk file copies to avoid performance problems on macOS, particularly with its new APFS file system (Tom Lane)
Prevent low-probability crash in processing of nested trigger firings (Tom Lane)
Allow COPY's FREEZE option to work when the transaction isolation level is REPEATABLE READ or higher (Noah Misch)
This case was unintentionally broken by a previous bug fix.
Correctly restore the umask setting when file creation fails in COPY or lo_export() (Peter Eisentraut)
Give a better error message for duplicate column names in ANALYZE (Nathan Bossart)
Add missing cases in GetCommandLogLevel(), preventing errors when certain SQL commands are used while log_statement is set to ddl (Michael Paquier)
Fix mis-parsing of the last line in a non-newline-terminated pg_hba.conf file (Tom Lane)
Fix AggGetAggref() to return the correct Aggref nodes to aggregate final functions whose transition calculations have been merged (Tom Lane)
Fix pg_dump to ensure that it emits GRANT commands in a valid order (Stephen Frost)
Fix pg_basebackup's matching of tablespace paths to canonicalize both paths before comparing (Michael Paquier)
This is particularly helpful on Windows.
Fix libpq to not require user's home directory to exist (Tom Lane)
In v10, failure to find the home directory while trying to read ~/.pgpass was treated as a hard error, but it should just cause that file to not be found. Both v10 and previous release branches made the same mistake when reading ~/.pg_service.conf, though this was less obvious since that file is not sought unless a service name is specified.
Fix libpq to guard against integer overflow in the row count of a PGresult (Michael Paquier)
Fix ecpg's handling of out-of-scope cursor declarations with pointer or array variables (Michael Meskes)
In ecpglib, correctly handle backslashes in string literals depending on whether standard_conforming_strings is set (Tsunakawa Takayuki)
Make ecpglib's Informix-compatibility mode ignore fractional digits in integer input strings, as expected (Gao Zengqi, Michael Meskes)
Fix ecpg's regression tests to work reliably on Windows (Christian Ullrich, Michael Meskes)
Fix missing temp-install prerequisites for check-like Make targets (Noah Misch)
Some non-default test procedures that are meant to work like make check failed to ensure that the temporary installation was up to date.
Sync our copy of the timezone library with IANA release tzcode2017c (Tom Lane)
This fixes various issues; the only one likely to be user-visible is that the default DST rules for a POSIX-style zone name, if no posixrules file exists in the timezone data directory, now match current US law rather than what it was a dozen years ago.
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2017c for DST law changes in Fiji, Namibia, Northern Cyprus, Sudan, Tonga, and Turks & Caicos Islands, plus historical corrections for Alaska, Apia, Burma, Calcutta, Detroit, Ireland, Namibia, and Pago Pago.
⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.7 released on 2018-02-08 - docs
Ensure that all temporary files made by pg_upgrade are non-world-readable (Tom Lane, Noah Misch)
pg_upgrade normally restricts its temporary files to be readable and writable only by the calling user. But the temporary file containing pg_dumpall -g output would be group- or world-readable, or even writable, if the user's umask setting allows. In typical usage on multi-user machines, the umask and/or the working directory's permissions would be tight enough to prevent problems; but there may be people using pg_upgrade in scenarios where this oversight would permit disclosure of database passwords to unfriendly eyes. (CVE-2018-1053)
Fix vacuuming of tuples that were updated while key-share locked (Andres Freund, Álvaro Herrera)
In some cases VACUUM would fail to remove such tuples even though they are now dead, leading to assorted data corruption scenarios.
Ensure that vacuum will always clean up the pending-insertions list of a GIN index (Masahiko Sawada)
This is necessary to ensure that dead index entries get removed. The old code got it backwards, allowing vacuum to skip the cleanup if some other process were running cleanup concurrently, thus risking invalid entries being left behind in the index.
Fix inadequate buffer locking in some LSN fetches (Jacob Champion, Asim Praveen, Ashwin Agrawal)
These errors could result in misbehavior under concurrent load. The potential consequences have not been characterized fully.
Fix incorrect query results from cases involving flattening of subqueries whose outputs are used in GROUPING SETS (Heikki Linnakangas)
Avoid unnecessary failure in a query on an inheritance tree that occurs concurrently with some child table being removed from the tree by ALTER TABLE NO INHERIT (Tom Lane)
Fix spurious deadlock failures when multiple sessions are running CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY (Jeff Janes)
Fix failures when an inheritance tree contains foreign child tables (Etsuro Fujita)
A mix of regular and foreign tables in an inheritance tree resulted in creation of incorrect plans for UPDATE and DELETE queries. This led to visible failures in some cases, notably when there are row-level triggers on a foreign child table.
Repair failure with correlated sub-SELECT inside VALUES inside a LATERAL subquery (Tom Lane)
Fix "could not devise a query plan for the given query" planner failure for some cases involving nested UNION ALL inside a lateral subquery (Tom Lane)
Fix logical decoding to correctly clean up disk files for crashed transactions (Atsushi Torikoshi)
Logical decoding may spill WAL records to disk for transactions generating many WAL records. Normally these files are cleaned up after the transaction's commit or abort record arrives; but if no such record is ever seen, the removal code misbehaved.
Fix walsender timeout failure and failure to respond to interrupts when processing a large transaction (Petr Jelinek)
Fix has_sequence_privilege() to support WITH GRANT OPTION tests, as other privilege-testing functions do (Joe Conway)
In databases using UTF8 encoding, ignore any XML declaration that asserts a different encoding (Pavel Stehule, Noah Misch)
We always store XML strings in the database encoding, so allowing libxml to act on a declaration of another encoding gave wrong results. In encodings other than UTF8, we don't promise to support non-ASCII XML data anyway, so retain the previous behavior for bug compatibility. This change affects only xpath() and related functions; other XML code paths already acted this way.
Provide for forward compatibility with future minor protocol versions (Robert Haas, Badrul Chowdhury)
Up to now, PostgreSQL servers simply rejected requests to use protocol versions newer than 3.0, so that there was no functional difference between the major and minor parts of the protocol version number. Allow clients to request versions 3.x without failing, sending back a message showing that the server only understands 3.0. This makes no difference at the moment, but back-patching this change should allow speedier introduction of future minor protocol upgrades.
Cope with failure to start a parallel worker process (Amit Kapila, Robert Haas)
Parallel query previously tended to hang indefinitely if a worker could not be started, as the result of fork() failure or other low-probability problems.
Fix collection of EXPLAIN statistics from parallel workers (Amit Kapila, Thomas Munro)
Avoid unsafe alignment assumptions when working with __int128 (Tom Lane)
Typically, compilers assume that __int128 variables are aligned on 16-byte boundaries, but our memory allocation infrastructure isn't prepared to guarantee that, and increasing the setting of MAXALIGN seems infeasible for multiple reasons. Adjust the code to allow use of __int128 only when we can tell the compiler to assume lesser alignment. The only known symptom of this problem so far is crashes in some parallel aggregation queries.
Prevent stack-overflow crashes when planning extremely deeply nested set operations (UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT) (Tom Lane)
Fix null-pointer crashes for some types of LDAP URLs appearing in pg_hba.conf (Thomas Munro)
Fix sample INSTR() functions in the PL/pgSQL documentation (Yugo Nagata, Tom Lane)
These functions are stated to be Oracle® compatible, but they weren't exactly. In particular, there was a discrepancy in the interpretation of a negative third parameter: Oracle thinks that a negative value indicates the last place where the target substring can begin, whereas our functions took it as the last place where the target can end. Also, Oracle throws an error for a zero or negative fourth parameter, whereas our functions returned zero.
The sample code has been adjusted to match Oracle's behavior more precisely. Users who have copied this code into their applications may wish to update their copies.
Fix pg_dump to make ACL (permissions), comment, and security label entries reliably identifiable in archive output formats (Tom Lane)
The "tag" portion of an ACL archive entry was usually just the name of the associated object. Make it start with the object type instead, bringing ACLs into line with the convention already used for comment and security label archive entries. Also, fix the comment and security label entries for the whole database, if present, to make their tags start with DATABASE so that they also follow this convention. This prevents false matches in code that tries to identify large-object-related entries by seeing if the tag starts with LARGE OBJECT. That could have resulted in misclassifying entries as data rather than schema, with undesirable results in a schema-only or data-only dump.
Note that this change has user-visible results in the output of pg_restore --list.
Rename pg_rewind's copy_file_range function to avoid conflict with new Linux system call of that name (Andres Freund)
This change prevents build failures with newer glibc versions.
In ecpg, detect indicator arrays that do not have the correct length and report an error (David Rader)
Change the behavior of contrib/cube's cube ~> int operator to make it compatible with KNN search (Alexander Korotkov)
The meaning of the second argument (the dimension selector) has been changed to make it predictable which value is selected even when dealing with cubes of varying dimensionalities.
This is an incompatible change, but since the point of the operator was to be used in KNN searches, it seems rather useless as-is. After installing this update, any expression indexes or materialized views using this operator will need to be reindexed/refreshed.
Avoid triggering a libc assertion in contrib/hstore, due to use of memcpy() with equal source and destination pointers (Tomas Vondra)
Fix incorrect display of tuples' null bitmaps in contrib/pageinspect (Maksim Milyutin)
In contrib/postgres_fdw, avoid "outer pathkeys do not match mergeclauses" planner error when constructing a plan involving a remote join (Robert Haas)
Provide modern examples of how to auto-start Postgres on macOS (Tom Lane)
The scripts in contrib/start-scripts/osx use infrastructure that's been deprecated for over a decade, and which no longer works at all in macOS releases of the last couple of years. Add a new subdirectory contrib/start-scripts/macos containing scripts that use the newer launchd infrastructure.
Fix incorrect selection of configuration-specific libraries for OpenSSL on Windows (Andrew Dunstan)
Support linking to MinGW-built versions of libperl (Noah Misch)
This allows building PL/Perl with some common Perl distributions for Windows.
Fix MSVC build to test whether 32-bit libperl needs -D_USE_32BIT_TIME_T (Noah Misch)
Available Perl distributions are inconsistent about what they expect, and lack any reliable means of reporting it, so resort to a build-time test on what the library being used actually does.
On Windows, install the crash dump handler earlier in postmaster startup (Takayuki Tsunakawa)
This may allow collection of a core dump for some early-startup failures that did not produce a dump before.
On Windows, avoid encoding-conversion-related crashes when emitting messages very early in postmaster startup (Takayuki Tsunakawa)
Use our existing Motorola 68K spinlock code on OpenBSD as well as NetBSD (David Carlier)
Add support for spinlocks on Motorola 88K (David Carlier)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2018c for DST law changes in Brazil, Sao Tome and Principe, plus historical corrections for Bolivia, Japan, and South Sudan. The US/Pacific-New zone has been removed (it was only an alias for America/Los_Angeles anyway).
⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.8 released on 2018-03-01 - docs
Document how to configure installations and applications to guard against search-path-dependent trojan-horse attacks from other users (Noah Misch)
Using a search_path setting that includes any schemas writable by a hostile user enables that user to capture control of queries and then run arbitrary SQL code with the permissions of the attacked user. While it is possible to write queries that are proof against such hijacking, it is notationally tedious, and it's very easy to overlook holes. Therefore, we now recommend configurations in which no untrusted schemas appear in one's search path. Relevant documentation appears in Section 5.8.6 (for database administrators and users), Section 32.1 (for application authors), Section 36.15.1 (for extension authors), and CREATE FUNCTION (for authors of SECURITY DEFINER functions). (CVE-2018-1058)
Avoid use of insecure search_path settings in pg_dump and other client programs (Noah Misch, Tom Lane)
pg_dump, pg_upgrade, vacuumdb and other PostgreSQL-provided applications were themselves vulnerable to the type of hijacking described in the previous changelog entry; since these applications are commonly run by superusers, they present particularly attractive targets. To make them secure whether or not the installation as a whole has been secured, modify them to include only the pg_catalog schema in their search_path settings. Autovacuum worker processes now do the same, as well.
In cases where user-provided functions are indirectly executed by these programs — for example, user-provided functions in index expressions — the tighter search_path may result in errors, which will need to be corrected by adjusting those user-provided functions to not assume anything about what search path they are invoked under. That has always been good practice, but now it will be necessary for correct behavior. (CVE-2018-1058)
Fix misbehavior of concurrent-update rechecks with CTE references appearing in subplans (Tom Lane)
If a CTE (WITH clause reference) is used in an InitPlan or SubPlan, and the query requires a recheck due to trying to update or lock a concurrently-updated row, incorrect results could be obtained.
Fix planner failures with overlapping mergejoin clauses in an outer join (Tom Lane)
These mistakes led to "left and right pathkeys do not match in mergejoin" or "outer pathkeys do not match mergeclauses" planner errors in corner cases.
Repair pg_upgrade's failure to preserve relfrozenxid for materialized views (Tom Lane, Andres Freund)
This oversight could lead to data corruption in materialized views after an upgrade, manifesting as "could not access status of transaction" or "found xmin from before relfrozenxid" errors. The problem would be more likely to occur in seldom-refreshed materialized views, or ones that were maintained only with REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW CONCURRENTLY.
If such corruption is observed, it can be repaired by refreshing the materialized view (without CONCURRENTLY).
Fix incorrect reporting of PL/Python function names in error CONTEXT stacks (Tom Lane)
An error occurring within a nested PL/Python function call (that is, one reached via a SPI query from another PL/Python function) would result in a stack trace showing the inner function's name twice, rather than the expected results. Also, an error in a nested PL/Python DO block could result in a null pointer dereference crash on some platforms.
Allow contrib/auto_explain's log_min_duration setting to range up to INT_MAX, or about 24 days instead of 35 minutes (Tom Lane)
Mark assorted GUC variables as PGDLLIMPORT, to ease porting extension modules to Windows (Metin Doslu)