Upgrading from 9.5.21 to 11.7 gives you 4.1 years worth of changes and fixes (878 of them)

List of changes:

• ⇑ 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)

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • 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 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.

  • Fix dangling-pointer problem in logical WAL decoding (Stas Kelvich)

  • 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)

  • 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)

• ⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.2 released on 2017-02-09 - docs

  • 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 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.

  • 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 spurious "query provides a value for a dropped column" errors during INSERT or UPDATE on a table with a dropped column (Tom Lane)

  • 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.

  • Fix crash if the number of workers available to a parallel query decreases during a rescan (Andreas Seltenreich)

  • 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)

  • 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.

  • 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 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 TABLE t ALTER c DROP ... (Kyotaro Horiguchi)

  • 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.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.3 released on 2017-05-11 - docs

  • 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 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)

  • 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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • In contrib/postgres_fdw, allow join conditions that contain shippable extension-provided functions to be pushed to the remote server (David Rowley, Ashutosh Bapat)

• ⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.4 released on 2017-08-10 - docs

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Allow parallelism in the query plan when COPY copies from a query's result (Andres Freund)

  • Fix pg_dump with the --clean option to not fail when the public schema doesn't exist (Stephen Frost)

• ⇑ Upgrade to 9.6.5 released on 2017-08-31 - docs

  • Prevent crash when passing fixed-length pass-by-reference data types to parallel worker processes (Tom Lane)

  • Change ecpg's parser to recognize backslash continuation of C preprocessor command lines (Michael Meskes)

• ⇑ Upgrade to 10 released on 2017-10-05 - docs

  • Hash indexes must be rebuilt after pg_upgrade-ing from any previous major PostgreSQL version (Mithun Cy, Robert Haas, Amit Kapila)

    Major hash index improvements necessitated this requirement. pg_upgrade will create a script to assist with this.

  • Rename write-ahead log directory pg_xlog to pg_wal, and rename transaction status directory pg_clog to pg_xact (Michael Paquier)

    Users have occasionally thought that these directories contained only inessential log files, and proceeded to remove write-ahead log files or transaction status files manually, causing irrecoverable data loss. These name changes are intended to discourage such errors in future.

  • Rename SQL functions, tools, and options that reference “xlog” to “wal” (Robert Haas)

    For example, pg_switch_xlog() becomes pg_switch_wal(), pg_receivexlog becomes pg_receivewal, and --xlogdir becomes --waldir. This is for consistency with the change of the pg_xlog directory name; in general, the “xlog” terminology is no longer used in any user-facing places.

  • Rename WAL-related functions and views to use lsn instead of location (David Rowley)

    There was previously an inconsistent mixture of the two terminologies.

  • Change the implementation of set-returning functions appearing in a query's SELECT list (Andres Freund)

    Set-returning functions are now evaluated before evaluation of scalar expressions in the SELECT list, much as though they had been placed in a LATERAL FROM-clause item. This allows saner semantics for cases where multiple set-returning functions are present. If they return different numbers of rows, the shorter results are extended to match the longest result by adding nulls. Previously the results were cycled until they all terminated at the same time, producing a number of rows equal to the least common multiple of the functions' periods. In addition, set-returning functions are now disallowed within CASE and COALESCE constructs. For more information see Section 37.4.8.

  • Use standard row constructor syntax in UPDATE ... SET (column_list) = row_constructor (Tom Lane)

    The row_constructor can now begin with the keyword ROW; previously that had to be omitted. If just one column name appears in the column_list, then the row_constructor now must use the ROW keyword, since otherwise it is not a valid row constructor but just a parenthesized expression. Also, an occurrence of table_name.* within the row_constructor is now expanded into multiple columns, as occurs in other uses of row_constructors.

  • When ALTER TABLE ... ADD PRIMARY KEY marks columns NOT NULL, that change now propagates to inheritance child tables as well (Michael Paquier)

  • Prevent statement-level triggers from firing more than once per statement (Tom Lane)

    Cases involving writable CTEs updating the same table updated by the containing statement, or by another writable CTE, fired BEFORE STATEMENT or AFTER STATEMENT triggers more than once. Also, if there were statement-level triggers on a table affected by a foreign key enforcement action (such as ON DELETE CASCADE), they could fire more than once per outer SQL statement. This is contrary to the SQL standard, so change it.

  • Move sequences' metadata fields into a new pg_sequence system catalog (Peter Eisentraut)

    A sequence relation now stores only the fields that can be modified by nextval(), that is last_value, log_cnt, and is_called. Other sequence properties, such as the starting value and increment, are kept in a corresponding row of the pg_sequence catalog. ALTER SEQUENCE updates are now fully transactional, implying that the sequence is locked until commit. The nextval() and setval() functions remain nontransactional.

    The main incompatibility introduced by this change is that selecting from a sequence relation now returns only the three fields named above. To obtain the sequence's other properties, applications must look into pg_sequence. The new system view pg_sequences can also be used for this purpose; it provides column names that are more compatible with existing code.

    Also, sequences created for SERIAL columns now generate positive 32-bit wide values, whereas previous versions generated 64-bit wide values. This has no visible effect if the values are only stored in a column.

    The output of psql's \d command for a sequence has been redesigned, too.

  • Make pg_basebackup stream the WAL needed to restore the backup by default (Magnus Hagander)

    This changes pg_basebackup's -X/--wal-method default to stream. An option value none has been added to reproduce the old behavior. The pg_basebackup option -x has been removed (instead, use -X fetch).

  • Change how logical replication uses pg_hba.conf (Peter Eisentraut)

    In previous releases, a logical replication connection required the replication keyword in the database column. As of this release, logical replication matches a normal entry with a database name or keywords such as all. Physical replication continues to use the replication keyword. Since built-in logical replication is new in this release, this change only affects users of third-party logical replication plugins.

  • Make all pg_ctl actions wait for completion by default (Peter Eisentraut)

    Previously some pg_ctl actions didn't wait for completion, and required the use of -w to do so.

  • Change the default value of the log_directory server parameter from pg_log to log (Andreas Karlsson)

  • Add configuration option ssl_dh_params_file to specify file name for custom OpenSSL DH parameters (Heikki Linnakangas)

    This replaces the hardcoded, undocumented file name dh1024.pem. Note that dh1024.pem is no longer examined by default; you must set this option if you want to use custom DH parameters.

  • Increase the size of the default DH parameters used for OpenSSL ephemeral DH ciphers to 2048 bits (Heikki Linnakangas)

    The size of the compiled-in DH parameters has been increased from 1024 to 2048 bits, making DH key exchange more resistant to brute-force attacks. However, some old SSL implementations, notably some revisions of Java Runtime Environment version 6, will not accept DH parameters longer than 1024 bits, and hence will not be able to connect over SSL. If it's necessary to support such old clients, you can use custom 1024-bit DH parameters instead of the compiled-in defaults. See ssl_dh_params_file.

  • Remove the ability to store unencrypted passwords on the server (Heikki Linnakangas)

    The password_encryption server parameter no longer supports off or plain. The UNENCRYPTED option is no longer supported in CREATE/ALTER USER ... PASSWORD. Similarly, the --unencrypted option has been removed from createuser. Unencrypted passwords migrated from older versions will be stored encrypted in this release. The default setting for password_encryption is still md5.

  • Add min_parallel_table_scan_size and min_parallel_index_scan_size server parameters to control parallel queries (Amit Kapila, Robert Haas)

    These replace min_parallel_relation_size, which was found to be too generic.

  • Don't downcase unquoted text within shared_preload_libraries and related server parameters (QL Zhuo)

    These settings are really lists of file names, but they were previously treated as lists of SQL identifiers, which have different parsing rules.

  • Remove sql_inheritance server parameter (Robert Haas)

    Changing this setting from the default value caused queries referencing parent tables to not include child tables. The SQL standard requires them to be included, however, and this has been the default since PostgreSQL 7.1.

  • Allow multi-dimensional arrays to be passed into PL/Python functions, and returned as nested Python lists (Alexey Grishchenko, Dave Cramer, Heikki Linnakangas)

    This feature requires a backwards-incompatible change to the handling of arrays of composite types in PL/Python. Previously, you could return an array of composite values by writing, e.g., [[col1, col2], [col1, col2]]; but now that is interpreted as a two-dimensional array. Composite types in arrays must now be written as Python tuples, not lists, to resolve the ambiguity; that is, write [(col1, col2), (col1, col2)] instead.

  • Remove PL/Tcl's “module” auto-loading facility (Tom Lane)

    This functionality has been replaced by new server parameters pltcl.start_proc and pltclu.start_proc, which are easier to use and more similar to features available in other PLs.

  • Remove pg_dump/pg_dumpall support for dumping from pre-8.0 servers (Tom Lane)

    Users needing to dump from pre-8.0 servers will need to use dump programs from PostgreSQL 9.6 or earlier. The resulting output should still load successfully into newer servers.

  • Remove support for floating-point timestamps and intervals (Tom Lane)

    This removes configure's --disable-integer-datetimes option. Floating-point timestamps have few advantages and have not been the default since PostgreSQL 8.3.

  • Remove server support for client/server protocol version 1.0 (Tom Lane)

    This protocol hasn't had client support since PostgreSQL 6.3.

  • Remove contrib/tsearch2 module (Robert Haas)

    This module provided compatibility with the version of full text search that shipped in pre-8.3 PostgreSQL releases.

  • Remove createlang and droplang command-line applications (Peter Eisentraut)

    These had been deprecated since PostgreSQL 9.1. Instead, use CREATE EXTENSION and DROP EXTENSION directly.

  • Remove support for version-0 function calling conventions (Andres Freund)

    Extensions providing C-coded functions must now conform to version 1 calling conventions. Version 0 has been deprecated since 2001.

  • Support parallel B-tree index scans (Rahila Syed, Amit Kapila, Robert Haas, Rafia Sabih)

    This change allows B-tree index pages to be searched by separate parallel workers.

  • Support parallel bitmap heap scans (Dilip Kumar)

    This allows a single index scan to dispatch parallel workers to process different areas of the heap.

  • Allow merge joins to be performed in parallel (Dilip Kumar)

  • Allow non-correlated subqueries to be run in parallel (Amit Kapila)

  • Improve ability of parallel workers to return pre-sorted data (Rushabh Lathia)

  • Increase parallel query usage in procedural language functions (Robert Haas, Rafia Sabih)

  • Add max_parallel_workers server parameter to limit the number of worker processes that can be used for query parallelism (Julien Rouhaud)

    This parameter can be set lower than max_worker_processes to reserve worker processes for purposes other than parallel queries.

  • Enable parallelism by default by changing the default setting of max_parallel_workers_per_gather to 2.

  • Add write-ahead logging support to hash indexes (Amit Kapila)

    This makes hash indexes crash-safe and replicatable. The former warning message about their use is removed.

  • Improve hash index performance (Amit Kapila, Mithun Cy, Ashutosh Sharma)

  • Add SP-GiST index support for INET and CIDR data types (Emre Hasegeli)

  • Add option to allow BRIN index summarization to happen more aggressively (Álvaro Herrera)

    A new CREATE INDEX option enables auto-summarization of the previous BRIN page range when a new page range is created.

  • Add functions to remove and re-add BRIN summarization for BRIN index ranges (Álvaro Herrera)

    The new SQL function brin_summarize_range() updates BRIN index summarization for a specified range and brin_desummarize_range() removes it. This is helpful to update summarization of a range that is now smaller due to UPDATEs and DELETEs.

  • Improve accuracy in determining if a BRIN index scan is beneficial (David Rowley, Emre Hasegeli)

  • Allow faster GiST inserts and updates by reusing index space more efficiently (Andrey Borodin)

  • Reduce page locking during vacuuming of GIN indexes (Andrey Borodin)

  • Reduce locking required to change table parameters (Simon Riggs, Fabrízio Mello)

    For example, changing a table's effective_io_concurrency setting can now be done with a more lightweight lock.

  • Allow tuning of predicate lock promotion thresholds (Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker)

    Lock promotion can now be controlled through two new server parameters, max_pred_locks_per_relation and max_pred_locks_per_page.

  • Add multi-column optimizer statistics to compute the correlation ratio and number of distinct values (Tomas Vondra, David Rowley, Álvaro Herrera)

    New commands are CREATE STATISTICS, ALTER STATISTICS, and DROP STATISTICS. This feature is helpful in estimating query memory usage and when combining the statistics from individual columns.

  • Improve performance of queries affected by row-level security restrictions (Tom Lane)

    The optimizer now has more knowledge about where it can place RLS filter conditions, allowing better plans to be generated while still enforcing the RLS conditions safely.

  • Speed up aggregate functions that calculate a running sum using numeric-type arithmetic, including some variants of SUM(), AVG(), and STDDEV() (Heikki Linnakangas)

  • Improve performance of character encoding conversions by using radix trees (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Heikki Linnakangas)

  • Reduce expression evaluation overhead during query execution, as well as plan node calling overhead (Andres Freund)

    This is particularly helpful for queries that process many rows.

  • Allow hashed aggregation to be used with grouping sets (Andrew Gierth)

  • Use uniqueness guarantees to optimize certain join types (David Rowley)

  • Improve sort performance of the macaddr data type (Brandur Leach)

  • Reduce statistics tracking overhead in sessions that reference many thousands of relations (Aleksander Alekseev)

  • Allow explicit control over EXPLAIN's display of planning and execution time (Ashutosh Bapat)

    By default planning and execution time are displayed by EXPLAIN ANALYZE and are not displayed in other cases. The new EXPLAIN option SUMMARY allows explicit control of this.

  • Add default monitoring roles (Dave Page)

    New roles pg_monitor, pg_read_all_settings, pg_read_all_stats, and pg_stat_scan_tables allow simplified permission configuration.

  • Properly update the statistics collector during REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW (Jim Mlodgenski)

  • Change the default value of log_line_prefix to include current timestamp (with milliseconds) and the process ID in each line of postmaster log output (Christoph Berg)

    The previous default was an empty prefix.

  • Add functions to return the log and WAL directory contents (Dave Page)

    The new functions are pg_ls_logdir() and pg_ls_waldir() and can be executed by non-superusers with the proper permissions.

  • Add function pg_current_logfile() to read logging collector's current stderr and csvlog output file names (Gilles Darold)

  • Report the address and port number of each listening socket in the server log during postmaster startup (Tom Lane)

    Also, when logging failure to bind a listening socket, include the specific address we attempted to bind to.

  • Reduce log chatter about the starting and stopping of launcher subprocesses (Tom Lane)

    These are now DEBUG1-level messages.

  • Reduce message verbosity of lower-numbered debug levels controlled by log_min_messages (Robert Haas)

    This also changes the verbosity of client_min_messages debug levels.

  • Add pg_stat_activity reporting of low-level wait states (Michael Paquier, Robert Haas, Rushabh Lathia)

    This change enables reporting of numerous low-level wait conditions, including latch waits, file reads/writes/fsyncs, client reads/writes, and synchronous replication.

  • Show auxiliary processes, background workers, and walsender processes in pg_stat_activity (Kuntal Ghosh, Michael Paquier)

    This simplifies monitoring. A new column backend_type identifies the process type.

  • Allow pg_stat_activity to show the SQL query being executed by parallel workers (Rafia Sabih)

  • Rename pg_stat_activity.wait_event_type values LWLockTranche and LWLockNamed to LWLock (Robert Haas)

    This makes the output more consistent.

  • Add SCRAM-SHA-256 support for password negotiation and storage (Michael Paquier, Heikki Linnakangas)

    This provides better security than the existing md5 negotiation and storage method.

  • Change the password_encryption server parameter from boolean to enum (Michael Paquier)

    This was necessary to support additional password hashing options.

  • Add view pg_hba_file_rules to display the contents of pg_hba.conf (Haribabu Kommi)

    This shows the file contents, not the currently active settings.

  • Support multiple RADIUS servers (Magnus Hagander)

    All the RADIUS related parameters are now plural and support a comma-separated list of servers.

  • Allow SSL configuration to be updated during configuration reload (Andreas Karlsson, Tom Lane)

    This allows SSL to be reconfigured without a server restart, by using pg_ctl reload, SELECT pg_reload_conf(), or sending a SIGHUP signal. However, reloading the SSL configuration does not work if the server's SSL key requires a passphrase, as there is no way to re-prompt for the passphrase. The original configuration will apply for the life of the postmaster in that case.

  • Make the maximum value of bgwriter_lru_maxpages effectively unlimited (Jim Nasby)

  • After creating or unlinking files, perform an fsync on their parent directory (Michael Paquier)

    This reduces the risk of data loss after a power failure.

  • Prevent unnecessary checkpoints and WAL archiving on otherwise-idle systems (Michael Paquier)

  • Add wal_consistency_checking server parameter to add details to WAL that can be sanity-checked on the standby (Kuntal Ghosh, Robert Haas)

    Any sanity-check failure generates a fatal error on the standby.

  • Increase the maximum configurable WAL segment size to one gigabyte (Beena Emerson)

    A larger WAL segment size allows for fewer archive_command invocations and fewer WAL files to manage.

  • Add the ability to logically replicate tables to standby servers (Petr Jelinek)

    Logical replication allows more flexibility than physical replication does, including replication between different major versions of PostgreSQL and selective replication.

  • Allow waiting for commit acknowledgment from standby servers irrespective of the order they appear in synchronous_standby_names (Masahiko Sawada)

    Previously the server always waited for the active standbys that appeared first in synchronous_standby_names. The new synchronous_standby_names keyword ANY allows waiting for any number of standbys irrespective of their ordering. This is known as quorum commit.

  • Reduce configuration changes necessary to perform streaming backup and replication (Magnus Hagander, Dang Minh Huong)

    Specifically, the defaults were changed for wal_level, max_wal_senders, max_replication_slots, and hot_standby to make them suitable for these usages out-of-the-box.

  • Enable replication from localhost connections by default in pg_hba.conf (Michael Paquier)

    Previously pg_hba.conf's replication connection lines were commented out by default. This is particularly useful for pg_basebackup.

  • Add columns to pg_stat_replication to report replication delay times (Thomas Munro)

    The new columns are write_lag, flush_lag, and replay_lag.

  • Allow specification of the recovery stopping point by Log Sequence Number (LSN) in recovery.conf (Michael Paquier)

    Previously the stopping point could only be selected by timestamp or XID.

  • Allow users to disable pg_stop_backup()'s waiting for all WAL to be archived (David Steele)

    An optional second argument to pg_stop_backup() controls that behavior.

  • Allow creation of temporary replication slots (Petr Jelinek)

    Temporary slots are automatically removed on session exit or error.

  • Improve performance of hot standby replay with better tracking of Access Exclusive locks (Simon Riggs, David Rowley)

  • Speed up two-phase commit recovery performance (Stas Kelvich, Nikhil Sontakke, Michael Paquier)

  • Add XMLTABLE function that converts XML-formatted data into a row set (Pavel Stehule, Álvaro Herrera)

  • Fix regular expressions' character class handling for large character codes, particularly Unicode characters above U+7FF (Tom Lane)

    Previously, such characters were never recognized as belonging to locale-dependent character classes such as [[:alpha:]].

  • Add table partitioning syntax that automatically creates partition constraints and handles routing of tuple insertions and updates (Amit Langote)

    The syntax supports range and list partitioning.

  • Add AFTER trigger transition tables to record changed rows (Kevin Grittner, Thomas Munro)

    Transition tables are accessible from triggers written in server-side languages.

  • Allow restrictive row-level security policies (Stephen Frost)

    Previously all security policies were permissive, meaning that any matching policy allowed access. A restrictive policy must match for access to be granted. These policy types can be combined.

  • When creating a foreign-key constraint, check for REFERENCES permission on only the referenced table (Tom Lane)

    Previously REFERENCES permission on the referencing table was also required. This appears to have stemmed from a misreading of the SQL standard. Since creating a foreign key (or any other type of) constraint requires ownership privilege on the constrained table, additionally requiring REFERENCES permission seems rather pointless.

  • Allow default permissions on schemas (Matheus Oliveira)

    This is done using the ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES command.

  • Add CREATE SEQUENCE AS command to create a sequence matching an integer data type (Peter Eisentraut)

    This simplifies the creation of sequences matching the range of base columns.

  • Allow COPY view FROM source on views with INSTEAD INSERT triggers (Haribabu Kommi)

    The triggers are fed the data rows read by COPY.

  • Allow the specification of a function name without arguments in DDL commands, if it is unique (Peter Eisentraut)

    For example, allow DROP FUNCTION on a function name without arguments if there is only one function with that name. This behavior is required by the SQL standard.

  • Allow multiple functions, operators, and aggregates to be dropped with a single DROP command (Peter Eisentraut)

  • Support IF NOT EXISTS in CREATE SERVER, CREATE USER MAPPING, and CREATE COLLATION (Anastasia Lubennikova, Peter Eisentraut)

  • Make VACUUM VERBOSE report the number of skipped frozen pages and oldest xmin (Masahiko Sawada, Simon Riggs)

    This information is also included in log_autovacuum_min_duration output.

  • Improve speed of VACUUM's removal of trailing empty heap pages (Claudio Freire, Álvaro Herrera)

  • Add full text search support for JSON and JSONB (Dmitry Dolgov)

    The functions ts_headline() and to_tsvector() can now be used on these data types.

  • Add support for EUI-64 MAC addresses, as a new data type macaddr8 (Haribabu Kommi)

    This complements the existing support for EUI-48 MAC addresses (type macaddr).

  • Add identity columns for assigning a numeric value to columns on insert (Peter Eisentraut)

    These are similar to SERIAL columns, but are SQL standard compliant.

  • Allow ENUM values to be renamed (Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker)

    This uses the syntax ALTER TYPE ... RENAME VALUE.

  • Properly treat array pseudotypes (anyarray) as arrays in to_json() and to_jsonb() (Andrew Dunstan)

    Previously columns declared as anyarray (particularly those in the pg_stats view) were converted to JSON strings rather than arrays.

  • Add operators for multiplication and division of money values with int8 values (Peter Eisentraut)

    Previously such cases would result in converting the int8 values to float8 and then using the money-and-float8 operators. The new behavior avoids possible precision loss. But note that division of money by int8 now truncates the quotient, like other integer-division cases, while the previous behavior would have rounded.

  • Check for overflow in the money type's input function (Peter Eisentraut)

  • Add simplified regexp_match() function (Emre Hasegeli)

    This is similar to regexp_matches(), but it only returns results from the first match so it does not need to return a set, making it easier to use for simple cases.

  • Add a version of jsonb's delete operator that takes an array of keys to delete (Magnus Hagander)

  • Make json_populate_record() and related functions process JSON arrays and objects recursively (Nikita Glukhov)

    With this change, array-type fields in the destination SQL type are properly converted from JSON arrays, and composite-type fields are properly converted from JSON objects. Previously, such cases would fail because the text representation of the JSON value would be fed to array_in() or record_in(), and its syntax would not match what those input functions expect.

  • Add function txid_current_if_assigned() to return the current transaction ID or NULL if no transaction ID has been assigned (Craig Ringer)

    This is different from txid_current(), which always returns a transaction ID, assigning one if necessary. Unlike that function, this function can be run on standby servers.

  • Add function txid_status() to check if a transaction was committed (Craig Ringer)

    This is useful for checking after an abrupt disconnection whether your previous transaction committed and you just didn't receive the acknowledgment.

  • Allow make_date() to interpret negative years as BC years (Álvaro Herrera)

  • Make to_timestamp() and to_date() reject out-of-range input fields (Artur Zakirov)

    For example, previously to_date('2009-06-40','YYYY-MM-DD') was accepted and returned 2009-07-10. It will now generate an error.

  • Allow PL/Python's cursor() and execute() functions to be called as methods of their plan-object arguments (Peter Eisentraut)

    This allows a more object-oriented programming style.

  • Allow PL/pgSQL's GET DIAGNOSTICS statement to retrieve values into array elements (Tom Lane)

    Previously, a syntactic restriction prevented the target variable from being an array element.

  • Allow PL/Tcl functions to return composite types and sets (Karl Lehenbauer)

  • Add a subtransaction command to PL/Tcl (Victor Wagner)

    This allows PL/Tcl queries to fail without aborting the entire function.

  • Add server parameters pltcl.start_proc and pltclu.start_proc, to allow initialization functions to be called on PL/Tcl startup (Tom Lane)

  • Allow specification of multiple host names or addresses in libpq connection strings and URIs (Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas)

    libpq will connect to the first responsive server in the list.

  • Allow libpq connection strings and URIs to request a read/write host, that is a master server rather than a standby server (Victor Wagner, Mithun Cy)

    This is useful when multiple host names are specified. It is controlled by libpq connection parameter target_session_attrs.

  • Allow the password file name to be specified as a libpq connection parameter (Julian Markwort)

    Previously this could only be specified via an environment variable.

  • Add function PQencryptPasswordConn() to allow creation of more types of encrypted passwords on the client side (Michael Paquier, Heikki Linnakangas)

    Previously only MD5-encrypted passwords could be created using PQencryptPassword(). This new function can also create SCRAM-SHA-256-encrypted passwords.

  • Change ecpg preprocessor version from 4.12 to 10 (Tom Lane)

    Henceforth the ecpg version will match the PostgreSQL distribution version number.

  • Add conditional branch support to psql (Corey Huinker)

    This feature adds psql meta-commands \if, \elif, \else, and \endif. This is primarily helpful for scripting.

  • Add psql \gx meta-command to execute (\g) a query in expanded mode (\x) (Christoph Berg)

  • Expand psql variable references in backtick-executed strings (Tom Lane)

    This is particularly useful in the new psql conditional branch commands.

  • Prevent psql's special variables from being set to invalid values (Daniel Vérité, Tom Lane)

    Previously, setting one of psql's special variables to an invalid value silently resulted in the default behavior. \set on a special variable now fails if the proposed new value is invalid. As a special exception, \set with an empty or omitted new value, on a boolean-valued special variable, still has the effect of setting the variable to on; but now it actually acquires that value rather than an empty string. \unset on a special variable now explicitly sets the variable to its default value, which is also the value it acquires at startup. In sum, a control variable now always has a displayable value that reflects what psql is actually doing.

  • Add variables showing server version and psql version (Fabien Coelho)

  • Improve psql's \d (display relation) and \dD (display domain) commands to show collation, nullable, and default properties in separate columns (Peter Eisentraut)

    Previously they were shown in a single “Modifiers” column.

  • Make the various \d commands handle no-matching-object cases more consistently (Daniel Gustafsson)

    They now all print the message about that to stderr, not stdout, and the message wording is more consistent.

  • Improve psql's tab completion (Jeff Janes, Ian Barwick, Andreas Karlsson, Sehrope Sarkuni, Thomas Munro, Kevin Grittner, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker)

  • Add pgbench option --log-prefix to control the log file prefix (Masahiko Sawada)

  • Allow pgbench's meta-commands to span multiple lines (Fabien Coelho)

    A meta-command can now be continued onto the next line by writing backslash-return.

  • Remove restriction on placement of -M option relative to other command line options (Tom Lane)

  • Add pg_receivewal option -Z/--compress to specify compression (Michael Paquier)

  • Add pg_recvlogical option --endpos to specify the ending position (Craig Ringer)

    This complements the existing --startpos option.

  • Rename initdb options --noclean and --nosync to be spelled --no-clean and --no-sync (Vik Fearing, Peter Eisentraut)

    The old spellings are still supported.

  • Allow pg_restore to exclude schemas (Michael Banck)

    This adds a new -N/--exclude-schema option.

  • Add --no-blobs option to pg_dump (Guillaume Lelarge)

    This suppresses dumping of large objects.

  • Add pg_dumpall option --no-role-passwords to omit role passwords (Robins Tharakan, Simon Riggs)

    This allows use of pg_dumpall by non-superusers; without this option, it fails due to inability to read passwords.

  • Support using synchronized snapshots when dumping from a standby server (Petr Jelinek)

  • Issue fsync() on the output files generated by pg_dump and pg_dumpall (Michael Paquier)

    This provides more security that the output is safely stored on disk before the program exits. This can be disabled with the new --no-sync option.

  • Allow pg_basebackup to stream write-ahead log in tar mode (Magnus Hagander)

    The WAL will be stored in a separate tar file from the base backup.

  • Make pg_basebackup use temporary replication slots (Magnus Hagander)

    Temporary replication slots will be used by default when pg_basebackup uses WAL streaming with default options.

  • Be more careful about fsync'ing in all required places in pg_basebackup and pg_receivewal (Michael Paquier)

  • Add pg_basebackup option --no-sync to disable fsync (Michael Paquier)

  • Improve pg_basebackup's handling of which directories to skip (David Steele)

  • Add wait option for pg_ctl's promote operation (Peter Eisentraut)

  • Add long options for pg_ctl wait (--wait) and no-wait (--no-wait) (Vik Fearing)

  • Add long option for pg_ctl server options (--options) (Peter Eisentraut)

  • Make pg_ctl start --wait detect server-ready by watching postmaster.pid, not by attempting connections (Tom Lane)

    The postmaster has been changed to report its ready-for-connections status in postmaster.pid, and pg_ctl now examines that file to detect whether startup is complete. This is more efficient and reliable than the old method, and it eliminates postmaster log entries about rejected connection attempts during startup.

  • Reduce pg_ctl's reaction time when waiting for postmaster start/stop (Tom Lane)

    pg_ctl now probes ten times per second when waiting for a postmaster state change, rather than once per second.

  • Ensure that pg_ctl exits with nonzero status if an operation being waited for does not complete within the timeout (Peter Eisentraut)

    The start and promote operations now return exit status 1, not 0, in such cases. The stop operation has always done that.

  • Change to two-part release version numbering (Peter Eisentraut, Tom Lane)

    Release numbers will now have two parts (e.g., 10.1) rather than three (e.g., 9.6.3). Major versions will now increase just the first number, and minor releases will increase just the second number. Release branches will be referred to by single numbers (e.g., 10 rather than 9.6). This change is intended to reduce user confusion about what is a major or minor release of PostgreSQL.

  • Improve behavior of pgindent (Piotr Stefaniak, Tom Lane)

    We have switched to a new version of pg_bsd_indent based on recent improvements made by the FreeBSD project. This fixes numerous small bugs that led to odd C code formatting decisions. Most notably, lines within parentheses (such as in a multi-line function call) are now uniformly indented to match the opening paren, even if that would result in code extending past the right margin.

  • Allow the ICU library to optionally be used for collation support (Peter Eisentraut)

    The ICU library has versioning that allows detection of collation changes between versions. It is enabled via configure option --with-icu. The default still uses the operating system's native collation library.

  • Automatically mark all PG_FUNCTION_INFO_V1 functions as DLLEXPORT-ed on Windows (Laurenz Albe)

    If third-party code is using extern function declarations, they should also add DLLEXPORT markers to those declarations.

  • Remove SPI functions SPI_push(), SPI_pop(), SPI_push_conditional(), SPI_pop_conditional(), and SPI_restore_connection() as unnecessary (Tom Lane)

    Their functionality now happens automatically. There are now no-op macros by these names so that external modules don't need to be updated immediately, but eventually such calls should be removed.

    A side effect of this change is that SPI_palloc() and allied functions now require an active SPI connection; they do not degenerate to simple palloc() if there is none. That previous behavior was not very useful and posed risks of unexpected memory leaks.

  • Allow shared memory to be dynamically allocated (Thomas Munro, Robert Haas)

  • Add slab-like memory allocator for efficient fixed-size allocations (Tomas Vondra)

  • Use POSIX semaphores rather than SysV semaphores on Linux and FreeBSD (Tom Lane)

    This avoids platform-specific limits on SysV semaphore usage.

  • Improve support for 64-bit atomics (Andres Freund)

  • Enable 64-bit atomic operations on ARM64 (Roman Shaposhnik)

  • Switch to using clock_gettime(), if available, for duration measurements (Tom Lane)

    gettimeofday() is still used if clock_gettime() is not available.

  • Add more robust random number generators to be used for cryptographically secure uses (Magnus Hagander, Michael Paquier, Heikki Linnakangas)

    If no strong random number generator can be found, configure will fail unless the --disable-strong-random option is used. However, with this option, pgcrypto functions requiring a strong random number generator will be disabled.

  • Allow WaitLatchOrSocket() to wait for socket connection on Windows (Andres Freund)

  • tupconvert.c functions no longer convert tuples just to embed a different composite-type OID in them (Ashutosh Bapat, Tom Lane)

    The majority of callers don't care about the composite-type OID; but if the result tuple is to be used as a composite Datum, steps should be taken to make sure the correct OID is inserted in it.

  • Remove SCO and Unixware ports (Tom Lane)

  • Overhaul documentation build process (Alexander Lakhin)

  • Use XSLT to build the PostgreSQL documentation (Peter Eisentraut)

    Previously Jade, DSSSL, and JadeTex were used.

  • Build HTML documentation using XSLT stylesheets by default (Peter Eisentraut)

  • Allow file_fdw to read from program output as well as files (Corey Huinker, Adam Gomaa)

  • In postgres_fdw, push aggregate functions to the remote server, when possible (Jeevan Chalke, Ashutosh Bapat)

    This reduces the amount of data that must be passed from the remote server, and offloads aggregate computation from the requesting server.

  • In postgres_fdw, push joins to the remote server in more cases (David Rowley, Ashutosh Bapat, Etsuro Fujita)

  • Properly support OID columns in postgres_fdw tables (Etsuro Fujita)

    Previously OID columns always returned zeros.

  • Allow btree_gist and btree_gin to index enum types (Andrew Dunstan)

    This allows enums to be used in exclusion constraints.

  • Add indexing support to btree_gist for the UUID data type (Paul Jungwirth)

  • Add amcheck which can check the validity of B-tree indexes (Peter Geoghegan)

  • Show ignored constants as $N rather than ? in pg_stat_statements (Lukas Fittl)

  • Improve cube's handling of zero-dimensional cubes (Tom Lane)

    This also improves handling of infinite and NaN values.

  • Allow pg_buffercache to run with fewer locks (Ivan Kartyshov)

    This makes it less disruptive when run on production systems.

  • Add pgstattuple function pgstathashindex() to view hash index statistics (Ashutosh Sharma)

  • Use GRANT permissions to control pgstattuple function usage (Stephen Frost)

    This allows DBAs to allow non-superusers to run these functions.

  • Reduce locking when pgstattuple examines hash indexes (Amit Kapila)

  • Add pageinspect function page_checksum() to show a page's checksum (Tomas Vondra)

  • Add pageinspect function bt_page_items() to print page items from a page image (Tomas Vondra)

  • Add hash index support to pageinspect (Jesper Pedersen, Ashutosh Sharma)

• ⇑ Upgrade to 10.1 released on 2017-11-09 - docs

  • Prevent logical replication from setting non-replicated columns to nulls when replicating an UPDATE (Petr Jelinek)

  • Fix logical replication to fire BEFORE ROW DELETE triggers when expected (Masahiko Sawada)

    Previously, that failed to happen unless the table also had a BEFORE ROW UPDATE trigger.

  • Ignore CTEs when looking up the target table for INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE, and prevent matching schema-qualified target table names to trigger transition table names (Thomas Munro)

    This restores the pre-v10 behavior for CTEs attached to DML commands.

  • Avoid evaluating an aggregate function's argument expression(s) at rows where its FILTER test fails (Tom Lane)

    This restores the pre-v10 (and SQL-standard) behavior.

  • Fix incorrect query results when multiple GROUPING SETS columns contain the same simple variable (Tom Lane)

  • Fix query-lifespan memory leakage while evaluating a set-returning function in a SELECT's target list (Tom Lane)

  • Allow parallel execution of prepared statements with generic plans (Amit Kapila, Kuntal Ghosh)

  • 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 crash in parallel execution of a bitmap scan having a BitmapAnd plan node below a BitmapOr node (Dilip Kumar)

  • Fix autovacuum's “work item” logic to prevent possible crashes and silent loss of work items (Álvaro Herrera)

  • Correctly ignore RelabelType expression nodes when examining functional-dependency statistics (David Rowley)

    This allows, e.g., extended statistics on varchar columns to be used properly.

  • 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)

  • 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)

  • Fix AggGetAggref() to return the correct Aggref nodes to aggregate final functions whose transition calculations have been merged (Tom Lane)

  • Fix insufficient schema-qualification in some new queries in pg_dump and psql (Vitaly Burovoy, Tom Lane, Noah Misch)

  • Avoid use of @> operator in psql's queries for \d (Tom Lane)

    This prevents problems when the parray_gin extension is installed, since that defines a conflicting operator.

  • In the documentation, restore HTML anchors to being upper-case strings (Peter Eisentraut)

    Due to a toolchain change, the 10.0 user manual had lower-case strings for intrapage anchors, thus breaking some external links into our website documentation. Return to our previous convention of using upper-case strings.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 10.2 released on 2018-02-08 - docs

  • Fix processing of partition keys containing multiple expressions (Álvaro Herrera, David Rowley)

    This error led to crashes or, with carefully crafted input, disclosure of arbitrary backend memory. (CVE-2018-1052)

  • Fix failure to mark a hash index's metapage dirty after adding a new overflow page, potentially leading to index corruption (Lixian Zou, Amit Kapila)

  • 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 handling of list partitioning constraints for partition keys of boolean or array types (Amit Langote)

  • During VACUUM FULL, update the table's size fields in pg_class sooner (Amit Kapila)

    This prevents poor behavior when rebuilding hash indexes on the table, since those use the pg_class statistics to govern the initial hash size.

  • Fix UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT over zero columns (Tom Lane)

  • Disallow identity columns on typed tables and partitions (Michael Paquier)

    These cases will be treated as unsupported features for now.

  • Fix assorted failures to apply the correct default value when inserting into an identity column (Michael Paquier, Peter Eisentraut)

    In several contexts, notably COPY and ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN, the expected default value was not applied and instead a null value was inserted.

  • Allow functional dependency statistics to be used for boolean columns (Tom Lane)

    Previously, although extended statistics could be declared and collected on boolean columns, the planner failed to apply them.

  • Avoid underestimating the number of groups emitted by subqueries containing set-returning functions in their grouping columns (Tom Lane)

    Cases similar to SELECT DISTINCT unnest(foo) got a lower output rowcount estimate in 10.0 than they did in earlier releases, possibly resulting in unfavorable plan choices. Restore the prior estimation behavior.

  • Fix use of triggers in logical replication workers (Petr Jelinek)

  • Fix race condition during replication origin drop that could allow the dropping process to wait indefinitely (Tom Lane)

  • Allow members of the pg_read_all_stats role to see walsender statistics in the pg_stat_replication view (Feike Steenbergen)

  • Show walsenders that are sending base backups as active in the pg_stat_activity view (Magnus Hagander)

  • Fix reporting of scram-sha-256 authentication method in the pg_hba_file_rules view (Michael Paquier)

    Previously this was printed as scram-sha256, possibly confusing users as to the correct spelling.

  • Allow a client that supports SCRAM channel binding (such as v11 or later libpq) to connect to a v10 server (Michael Paquier)

    v10 does not have this feature, and the connection-time negotiation about whether to use it was done incorrectly.

  • Avoid live-lock in ConditionVariableBroadcast() (Tom Lane, Thomas Munro)

    Given repeatedly-unlucky timing, a process attempting to awaken all waiters for a condition variable could loop indefinitely. Due to the limited usage of condition variables in v10, this affects only parallel index scans and some operations on replication slots.

  • Clean up waits for condition variables correctly during subtransaction abort (Robert Haas)

  • Ensure that child processes that are waiting for a condition variable will exit promptly if the postmaster process dies (Tom Lane)

  • Fix crashes in parallel queries using more than one Gather node (Thomas Munro)

  • Fix hang in parallel index scan when processing a deleted or half-dead index page (Amit Kapila)

  • Avoid crash if parallel bitmap heap scan is unable to allocate a shared memory segment (Robert Haas)

  • Avoid unnecessary failure when no parallel workers can be obtained during parallel query startup (Robert Haas)

  • Fix collection of EXPLAIN statistics from parallel workers (Amit Kapila, Thomas Munro)

  • Ensure that query strings passed to parallel workers are correctly null-terminated (Thomas Munro)

    This prevents emitting garbage in postmaster log output from such workers.

  • Avoid crash during an EvalPlanQual recheck of an indexscan that is the inner child of a merge join (Tom Lane)

    This could only happen during an update or SELECT FOR UPDATE of a join, when there is a concurrent update of some selected row.

  • Fix crash in autovacuum when extended statistics are defined for a table but can't be computed (Álvaro Herrera)

  • Prevent out-of-memory failures due to excessive growth of simple hash tables (Tomas Vondra, Andres Freund)

  • 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.

  • Fix incorrect display of tuples' null bitmaps in contrib/pageinspect (Maksim Milyutin)

  • Fix incorrect output from contrib/pageinspect's hash_page_items() function (Masahiko Sawada)

  • In contrib/postgres_fdw, avoid “outer pathkeys do not match mergeclauses” planner error when constructing a plan involving a remote join (Robert Haas)

  • In contrib/postgres_fdw, avoid planner failure when there are duplicate GROUP BY entries (Jeevan Chalke)

• ⇑ Upgrade to 10.3 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 33.1 (for application authors), Section 37.15.1 (for extension authors), and CREATE FUNCTION (for authors of SECURITY DEFINER functions). (CVE-2018-1058)

  • Prevent logical replication from trying to ship changes for unpublishable relations (Peter Eisentraut)

    A publication marked FOR ALL TABLES would incorrectly ship changes in materialized views and information_schema tables, which are supposed to be omitted from the change stream.

  • Fix incorrect pg_dump output for some non-default sequence limit values (Alexey Bashtanov)

  • Fix pg_dump's mishandling of STATISTICS objects (Tom Lane)

    An extended statistics object's schema was mislabeled in the dump's table of contents, possibly leading to the wrong results in a schema-selective restore. Its ownership was not correctly restored, either. Also, change the logic so that statistics objects are dumped/restored, or not, as independent objects rather than tying them to the dump/restore decision for the table they are on. The original definition could not scale to the planned future extension to cross-table statistics.

  • Mark assorted GUC variables as PGDLLIMPORT, to ease porting extension modules to Windows (Metin Doslu)

• ⇑ Upgrade to 10.4 released on 2018-05-10 - docs

  • Remove public execute privilege from contrib/adminpack's pg_logfile_rotate() function (Stephen Frost)

    pg_logfile_rotate() is a deprecated wrapper for the core function pg_rotate_logfile(). When that function was changed to rely on SQL privileges for access control rather than a hard-coded superuser check, pg_logfile_rotate() should have been updated as well, but the need for this was missed. Hence, if adminpack is installed, any user could request a logfile rotation, creating a minor security issue.

    After installing this update, administrators should update adminpack by performing ALTER EXTENSION adminpack UPDATE in each database in which adminpack is installed. (CVE-2018-1115)

  • Fix incorrect parallel-safety markings on a few built-in functions (Thomas Munro, Tom Lane)

    The functions brin_summarize_new_values, brin_summarize_range, brin_desummarize_range, gin_clean_pending_list, cursor_to_xml, cursor_to_xmlschema, ts_rewrite, ts_stat, binary_upgrade_create_empty_extension, and pg_import_system_collations should be marked parallel-unsafe; some because they perform database modifications directly, and others because they execute user-supplied queries that might do so. They were marked parallel-restricted instead, leading to a risk of unexpected query errors. This has been repaired for new installations by correcting the initial catalog data, but existing installations will continue to contain the incorrect markings. Practical use of these functions seems to pose little hazard unless force_parallel_mode is turned on. In case of trouble, it can be fixed by manually updating these functions' pg_proc entries, for example ALTER FUNCTION pg_catalog.brin_summarize_new_values(regclass) PARALLEL UNSAFE. (Note that that will need to be done in each database of the installation.) Another option is to pg_upgrade the database to a version containing the corrected initial data.

  • Correctly enforce any CHECK constraints on individual partitions during COPY to a partitioned table (Etsuro Fujita)

    Previously, only constraints declared for the partitioned table as a whole were checked.

  • Accept TRUE and FALSE as partition bound values (Amit Langote)

    Previously, only string-literal values were accepted for a boolean partitioning column. But then pg_dump would print such values as TRUE or FALSE, leading to dump/reload failures.

  • Fix memory management for partition key comparison functions (Álvaro Herrera, Amit Langote)

    This error could lead to crashes when using user-defined operator classes for partition keys.

  • Fix possible crash when a query inserts tuples in several partitions of a partitioned table, and those partitions don't have identical row types (Etsuro Fujita, Amit Langote)

  • Include extended-statistics objects in the set of table properties duplicated by CREATE TABLE ... LIKE ... INCLUDING ALL (David Rowley)

    Also add an INCLUDING STATISTICS option, to allow finer-grained control over whether this happens.

  • Fix CREATE TABLE ... LIKE with bigint identity columns (Peter Eisentraut)

    On platforms where long is 32 bits (which includes 64-bit Windows as well as most 32-bit machines), copied sequence parameters would be truncated to 32 bits.

  • Prevent planner crash when a query has multiple GROUPING SETS, none of which can be implemented by sorting (Andrew Gierth)

  • Fix executor crash due to double free in some GROUPING SETS usages (Peter Geoghegan)

  • Fix misexecution of self-joins on transition tables (Thomas Munro)

  • Fix possible leak or double free of visibility map buffer pins (Amit Kapila)

  • Avoid spuriously marking pages as all-visible (Dan Wood, Pavan Deolasee, Álvaro Herrera)

    This could happen if some tuples were locked (but not deleted). While queries would still function correctly, vacuum would normally ignore such pages, with the long-term effect that the tuples were never frozen. In recent releases this would eventually result in errors such as “found multixact nnnnn from before relminmxid nnnnn”.

  • Handle pg_stat_activity information for auxiliary processes correctly (Edmund Horner)

    The application_name, client_hostname, and query fields might show incorrect data for such processes.

  • Prevent query-lifespan memory leakage with SP-GiST operator classes that use traversal values (Anton Dignös)

  • Fix logical replication to not assume that type OIDs match between the local and remote servers (Masahiko Sawada)

  • Fix errors in initial build of contrib/bloom indexes (Tomas Vondra, Tom Lane)

    Fix possible omission of the table's last tuple from the index. Count the number of index tuples correctly, in case it is a partial index.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 10.5 released on 2018-08-09 - docs

  • Ensure that a snapshot is provided when executing data type input functions in logical replication subscribers (Minh-Quan Tran, Álvaro Herrera)

    This omission led to failures in some cases, such as domains with constraints using SQL-language functions.

  • Add subtransaction handling in logical-replication table synchronization workers (Amit Khandekar, Robert Haas)

    Previously, table synchronization could misbehave if any subtransactions were aborted after modifying a table being synchronized.

  • Pad arrays of unnamed POSIX semaphores to reduce cache line sharing (Thomas Munro)

    This reduces contention on many-CPU systems, fixing a performance regression (compared to previous releases) on Linux and FreeBSD.

  • Ensure that a process doing a parallel index scan will respond to signals (Amit Kapila)

    Previously, parallel workers could get stuck waiting for a lock on an index page, and not notice requests to abort the query.

  • Fix hash-join costing mistake introduced with inner_unique optimization (David Rowley)

    This could lead to bad plan choices in situations where that optimization was applicable.

  • Fix planner to avoid “ORDER/GROUP BY expression not found in targetlist” errors in some queries with set-returning functions (Tom Lane)

  • Fix handling of partition keys whose data type uses a polymorphic btree operator class, such as arrays (Amit Langote, Álvaro Herrera)

  • Remove undocumented restriction against duplicate partition key columns (Yugo Nagata)

  • Disallow temporary tables from being partitions of non-temporary tables (Amit Langote, Michael Paquier)

    While previously allowed, this case didn't work reliably.

  • Fix EXPLAIN's accounting for resource usage, particularly buffer accesses, in parallel workers (Amit Kapila, Robert Haas)

  • Fix SHOW ALL to show all settings to roles that are members of pg_read_all_settings, and also allow such roles to see source filename and line number in the pg_settings view (Laurenz Albe, Álvaro Herrera)

  • Fix failure to schema-qualify some object names in getObjectDescription and getObjectIdentity output (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Tom Lane)

    Names of collations, conversions, text search objects, publication relations, and extended statistics objects were not schema-qualified when they should be.

  • Fix CREATE AGGREGATE type checking so that parallelism support functions can be attached to variadic aggregates (Alexey Bashtanov)

  • Allow replication slots to be dropped in single-user mode (Álvaro Herrera)

    This use-case was accidentally broken in release 10.0.

  • Fix incorrect results from variance(int4) and related aggregates when run in parallel aggregation mode (David Rowley)

  • Process TEXT and CDATA nodes correctly in xmltable() column expressions (Markus Winand)

  • Cope with possible failure of OpenSSL's RAND_bytes() function (Dean Rasheed, Michael Paquier)

    Under rare circumstances, this oversight could result in “could not generate random cancel key” failures that could only be resolved by restarting the postmaster.

  • Fix libpq's handling of some cases where hostaddr is specified (Hari Babu, Tom Lane, Robert Haas)

    PQhost() gave misleading or incorrect results in some cases. Now, it uniformly returns the host name if specified, or the host address if only that is specified, or the default host name (typically /tmp or localhost) if both parameters are omitted.

    Also, the wrong value might be compared to the server name when verifying an SSL certificate.

    Also, the wrong value might be compared to the host name field in ~/.pgpass. Now, that field is compared to the host name if specified, or the host address if only that is specified, or localhost if both parameters are omitted.

    Also, an incorrect error message was reported for an unparseable hostaddr value.

    Also, when the host, hostaddr, or port parameters contain comma-separated lists, libpq is now more careful to treat empty elements of a list as selecting the default behavior.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11 released on 2018-10-18 - docs

  • Make pg_dump dump the properties of a database, not just its contents (Haribabu Kommi)

    Previously, attributes of the database itself, such as database-level GRANT/REVOKE permissions and ALTER DATABASE SET variable settings, were only dumped by pg_dumpall. Now pg_dump --create and pg_restore --create will restore these database properties in addition to the objects within the database. pg_dumpall -g now only dumps role- and tablespace-related attributes. pg_dumpall's complete output (without -g) is unchanged.

    pg_dump and pg_restore, without --create, no longer dump/restore database-level comments and security labels; those are now treated as properties of the database.

    pg_dumpall's output script will now always create databases with their original locale and encoding, and hence will fail if the locale or encoding name is unknown to the destination system. Previously, CREATE DATABASE would be emitted without these specifications if the database locale and encoding matched the old cluster's defaults.

    pg_dumpall --clean now restores the original locale and encoding settings of the postgres and template1 databases, as well as those of user-created databases.

  • Consider syntactic form when disambiguating function versus column references (Tom Lane)

    When x is a table name or composite column, PostgreSQL has traditionally considered the syntactic forms f(x) and x.f to be equivalent, allowing tricks such as writing a function and then using it as though it were a computed-on-demand column. However, if both interpretations are feasible, the column interpretation was always chosen, leading to surprising results if the user intended the function interpretation. Now, if there is ambiguity, the interpretation that matches the syntactic form is chosen.

  • Fully enforce uniqueness of table and domain constraint names (Tom Lane)

    PostgreSQL expects the names of a table's constraints to be distinct, and likewise for the names of a domain's constraints. However, there was not rigid enforcement of this, and previously there were corner cases where duplicate names could be created.

  • Make power(numeric, numeric) and power(float8, float8) handle NaN inputs according to the POSIX standard (Tom Lane, Dang Minh Huong)

    POSIX says that NaN ^ 0 = 1 and 1 ^ NaN = 1, but all other cases with NaN input(s) should return NaN. power(numeric, numeric) just returned NaN in all such cases; now it honors the two exceptions. power(float8, float8) followed the standard if the C library does; but on some old Unix platforms the library doesn't, and there were also problems on some versions of Windows.

  • Prevent to_number() from consuming characters when the template separator does not match (Oliver Ford)

    Specifically, SELECT to_number('1234', '9,999') used to return 134. It will now return 1234. L and TH now only consume characters that are not digits, positive/negative signs, decimal points, or commas.

  • Fix to_date(), to_number(), and to_timestamp() to skip a character for each template character (Tom Lane)

    Previously, they skipped one byte for each byte of template character, resulting in strange behavior if either string contained multibyte characters.

  • Adjust the handling of backslashes inside double-quotes in template strings for to_char(), to_number(), and to_timestamp().

    Such a backslash now escapes the character after it, particularly a double-quote or another backslash.

  • Correctly handle relative path expressions in xmltable(), xpath(), and other XML-handling functions (Markus Winand)

    Per the SQL standard, relative paths start from the document node of the XML input document, not the root node as these functions previously did.

  • In the extended query protocol, make statement_timeout apply to each Execute message separately, not to all commands before Sync (Tatsuo Ishii, Andres Freund)

  • Remove the relhaspkey column from system catalog pg_class (Peter Eisentraut)

    Applications needing to check for a primary key should consult pg_index.

  • Replace system catalog pg_proc's proisagg and proiswindow columns with prokind (Peter Eisentraut)

    This new column more clearly distinguishes functions, procedures, aggregates, and window functions.

  • Correct information schema column tables.table_type to return FOREIGN instead of FOREIGN TABLE (Peter Eisentraut)

    This new output matches the SQL standard.

  • Change the ps process display labels for background workers to match the pg_stat_activity.backend_type labels (Peter Eisentraut)

  • Cause large object permission checks to happen during large object open, lo_open(), not when a read or write is attempted (Tom Lane, Michael Paquier)

    If write access is requested and not available, an error will now be thrown even if the large object is never written to.

  • Prevent non-superusers from reindexing shared catalogs (Michael Paquier, Robert Haas)

    Previously, database owners were also allowed to do this, but now it is considered outside the bounds of their privileges.

  • Remove deprecated adminpack functions pg_file_read(), pg_file_length(), and pg_logfile_rotate() (Stephen Frost)

    Equivalent functionality is now present in the core backend. Existing adminpack installs will continue to have access to these functions until they are updated via ALTER EXTENSION ... UPDATE.

  • Honor the capitalization of double-quoted command options (Daniel Gustafsson)

    Previously, option names in certain SQL commands were forcibly lower-cased even if entered with double quotes; thus for example "FillFactor" would be accepted as an index storage option, though properly its name is lower-case. Such cases will now generate an error.

  • Remove server parameter replacement_sort_tuples (Peter Geoghegan)

    Replacement sorts were determined to be no longer useful.

  • Remove WITH clause in CREATE FUNCTION (Michael Paquier)

    PostgreSQL has long supported a more standard-compliant syntax for this capability.

  • In PL/pgSQL trigger functions, the OLD and NEW variables now read as NULL when not assigned (Tom Lane)

    Previously, references to these variables could be parsed but not executed.

  • Allow the creation of partitions based on hashing a key column (Amul Sul)

  • Support indexes on partitioned tables (Álvaro Herrera, Amit Langote)

    An “index” on a partitioned table is not a physical index across the whole partitioned table, but rather a template for automatically creating similar indexes on each partition of the table.

    If the partition key is part of the index's column set, a partitioned index may be declared UNIQUE. It will represent a valid uniqueness constraint across the whole partitioned table, even though each physical index only enforces uniqueness within its own partition.

    The new command ALTER INDEX ATTACH PARTITION causes an existing index on a partition to be associated with a matching index template for its partitioned table. This provides flexibility in setting up a new partitioned index for an existing partitioned table.

  • Allow foreign keys on partitioned tables (Álvaro Herrera)

  • Allow FOR EACH ROW triggers on partitioned tables (Álvaro Herrera)

    Creation of a trigger on a partitioned table automatically creates triggers on all existing and future partitions. This also allows deferred unique constraints on partitioned tables.

  • Allow partitioned tables to have a default partition (Jeevan Ladhe, Beena Emerson, Ashutosh Bapat, Rahila Syed, Robert Haas)

    The default partition will store rows that don't match any of the other defined partitions, and is searched accordingly.

  • UPDATE statements that change a partition key column now cause affected rows to be moved to the appropriate partitions (Amit Khandekar)

  • Allow INSERT, UPDATE, and COPY on partitioned tables to properly route rows to foreign partitions (Etsuro Fujita, Amit Langote)

    This is supported by postgres_fdw foreign tables. Since the ExecForeignInsert callback function is called for this in a different way than it used to be, foreign data wrappers must be modified to cope with this change.

  • Allow faster partition elimination during query processing (Amit Langote, David Rowley, Dilip Kumar)

    This speeds access to partitioned tables with many partitions.

  • Allow partition elimination during query execution (David Rowley, Beena Emerson)

    Previously, partition elimination only happened at planning time, meaning many joins and prepared queries could not use partition elimination.

  • In an equality join between partitioned tables, allow matching partitions to be joined directly (Ashutosh Bapat)

    This feature is disabled by default but can be enabled by changing enable_partitionwise_join.

  • Allow aggregate functions on partitioned tables to be evaluated separately for each partition, subsequently merging the results (Jeevan Chalke, Ashutosh Bapat, Robert Haas)

    This feature is disabled by default but can be enabled by changing enable_partitionwise_aggregate.

  • Allow postgres_fdw to push down aggregates to foreign tables that are partitions (Jeevan Chalke)

  • Allow parallel building of a btree index (Peter Geoghegan, Rushabh Lathia, Heikki Linnakangas)

  • Allow hash joins to be performed in parallel using a shared hash table (Thomas Munro)

  • Allow UNION to run each SELECT in parallel if the individual SELECTs cannot be parallelized (Amit Khandekar, Robert Haas, Amul Sul)

  • Allow partition scans to more efficiently use parallel workers (Amit Khandekar, Robert Haas, Amul Sul)

  • Allow LIMIT to be passed to parallel workers (Robert Haas, Tom Lane)

    This allows workers to reduce returned results and use targeted index scans.

  • Allow single-evaluation queries, e.g. WHERE clause aggregate queries, and functions in the target list to be parallelized (Amit Kapila, Robert Haas)

  • Add server parameter parallel_leader_participation to control whether the leader also executes subplans (Thomas Munro)

    The default is enabled, meaning the leader will execute subplans.

  • Allow parallelization of commands CREATE TABLE ... AS, SELECT INTO, and CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW (Haribabu Kommi)

  • Improve performance of sequential scans with many parallel workers (David Rowley)

  • Add reporting of parallel workers' sort activity in EXPLAIN (Robert Haas, Tom Lane)

  • Allow B-tree indexes to include columns that are not part of the search key or unique constraint, but are available to be read by index-only scans (Anastasia Lubennikova, Alexander Korotkov, Teodor Sigaev)

    This is enabled by the new INCLUDE clause of CREATE INDEX. It facilitates building “covering indexes” that optimize specific types of queries. Columns can be included even if their data types don't have B-tree support.

  • Improve performance of monotonically increasing index additions (Pavan Deolasee, Peter Geoghegan)

  • Improve performance of hash index scans (Ashutosh Sharma)

  • Add predicate locking for hash, GiST and GIN indexes (Shubham Barai)

    This reduces the likelihood of serialization conflicts in serializable-mode transactions.

  • Add prefix-match operator text ^@ text, which is supported by SP-GiST (Ildus Kurbangaliev)

    This is similar to using var LIKE 'word%' with a btree index, but it is more efficient.

  • Allow polygons to be indexed with SP-GiST (Nikita Glukhov, Alexander Korotkov)

  • Allow SP-GiST to use lossy representation of leaf keys (Teodor Sigaev, Heikki Linnakangas, Alexander Korotkov, Nikita Glukhov)

  • Improve selection of the most common values for statistics (Jeff Janes, Dean Rasheed)

    Previously, the most common values (MCVs) were identified based on their frequency compared to all column values. Now, MCVs are chosen based on their frequency compared to the non-MCV values. This improves the robustness of the algorithm for both uniform and non-uniform distributions.

  • Improve selectivity estimates for >= and <= (Tom Lane)

    Previously, such cases used the same selectivity estimates as > and <, respectively, unless the comparison constants are MCVs. This change is particularly helpful for queries involving BETWEEN with small ranges.

  • Reduce var = var to var IS NOT NULL where equivalent (Tom Lane)

    This leads to better selectivity estimates.

  • Improve optimizer's row count estimates for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS queries (Tom Lane)

  • Make the optimizer account for evaluation costs and selectivity of HAVING clauses (Tom Lane)

  • Add Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation of some parts of query plans to improve execution speed (Andres Freund)

    This feature requires LLVM to be available. It is not currently enabled by default, even in builds that support it.

  • Allow bitmap scans to perform index-only scans when possible (Alexander Kuzmenkov)

  • Update the free space map during VACUUM (Claudio Freire)

    This allows free space to be reused more quickly.

  • Allow VACUUM to avoid unnecessary index scans (Masahiko Sawada, Alexander Korotkov)

  • Improve performance of committing multiple concurrent transactions (Amit Kapila)

  • Reduce memory usage for queries using set-returning functions in their target lists (Andres Freund)

  • Improve the speed of aggregate computations (Andres Freund)

  • Allow postgres_fdw to push UPDATEs and DELETEs using joins to foreign servers (Etsuro Fujita)

    Previously, only non-join UPDATEs and DELETEs were pushed.

  • Add support for large pages on Windows (Takayuki Tsunakawa, Thomas Munro)

    This is controlled by the huge_pages configuration parameter.

  • Show memory usage in output from log_statement_stats, log_parser_stats, log_planner_stats, and log_executor_stats (Justin Pryzby, Peter Eisentraut)

  • Add column pg_stat_activity.backend_type to show the type of a background worker (Peter Eisentraut)

    The type is also visible in ps output.

  • Make log_autovacuum_min_duration log skipped tables that are concurrently being dropped (Nathan Bossart)

  • Add information_schema columns related to table constraints and triggers (Peter Eisentraut)

    Specifically, triggers.action_order, triggers.action_reference_old_table, and triggers.action_reference_new_table are now populated, where before they were always null. Also, table_constraints.enforced now exists but is not yet usefully populated.

  • Allow the server to specify more complex LDAP specifications in search+bind mode (Thomas Munro)

    Specifically, ldapsearchfilter allows pattern matching using combinations of LDAP attributes.

  • Allow LDAP authentication to use encrypted LDAP (Thomas Munro)

    We already supported LDAP over TLS by using ldaptls=1. This new TLS LDAP method for encrypted LDAP is enabled with ldapscheme=ldaps or ldapurl=ldaps://.

  • Improve logging of LDAP errors (Thomas Munro)

  • Add default roles that enable file system access (Stephen Frost)

    Specifically, the new roles are: pg_read_server_files, pg_write_server_files, and pg_execute_server_program. These roles now also control who can use server-side COPY and the file_fdw extension. Previously, only superusers could use these functions, and that is still the default behavior.

  • Allow access to file system functions to be controlled by GRANT/REVOKE permissions, rather than superuser checks (Stephen Frost)

    Specifically, these functions were modified: pg_ls_dir(), pg_read_file(), pg_read_binary_file(), pg_stat_file().

  • Use GRANT/REVOKE to control access to lo_import() and lo_export() (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)

    Previously, only superusers were granted access to these functions.

    The compile-time option ALLOW_DANGEROUS_LO_FUNCTIONS has been removed.

  • Use view owner not session owner when preventing non-password access to postgres_fdw tables (Robert Haas)

    PostgreSQL only allows superusers to access postgres_fdw tables without passwords, e.g. via peer. Previously, the session owner had to be a superuser to allow such access; now the view owner is checked instead.

  • Fix invalid locking permission check in SELECT FOR UPDATE on views (Tom Lane)

  • Add server setting ssl_passphrase_command to allow supplying of the passphrase for SSL key files (Peter Eisentraut)

    Also add ssl_passphrase_command_supports_reload to specify whether the SSL configuration should be reloaded and ssl_passphrase_command called during a server configuration reload.

  • Add storage parameter toast_tuple_target to control the minimum tuple length before TOAST storage will be considered (Simon Riggs)

    The default TOAST threshold has not been changed.

  • Allow server options related to memory and file sizes to be specified in units of bytes (Beena Emerson)

    The new unit suffix is “B”. This is in addition to the existing units “kB”, “MB”, “GB” and “TB”.

  • Allow the WAL file size to be set during initdb (Beena Emerson)

    Previously, the 16MB default could only be changed at compile time.

  • Retain WAL data for only a single checkpoint (Simon Riggs)

    Previously, WAL was retained for two checkpoints.

  • Fill the unused portion of force-switched WAL segment files with zeros for improved compressibility (Chapman Flack)

  • Replicate TRUNCATE activity when using logical replication (Simon Riggs, Marco Nenciarini, Peter Eisentraut)

  • Pass prepared transaction information to logical replication subscribers (Nikhil Sontakke, Stas Kelvich)

  • Exclude unlogged tables, temporary tables, and pg_internal.init files from streaming base backups (David Steele)

    There is no need to copy such files.

  • Allow checksums of heap pages to be verified during streaming base backup (Michael Banck)

  • Allow replication slots to be advanced programmatically, rather than be consumed by subscribers (Petr Jelinek)

    This allows efficient advancement of replication slots when the contents do not need to be consumed. This is performed by pg_replication_slot_advance().

  • Add timeline information to the backup_label file (Michael Paquier)

    Also add a check that the WAL timeline matches the backup_label file's timeline.

  • Add host and port connection information to the pg_stat_wal_receiver system view (Haribabu Kommi)

  • Allow ALTER TABLE to add a column with a non-null default without doing a table rewrite (Andrew Dunstan, Serge Rielau)

    This is enabled when the default value is a constant.

  • Allow views to be locked by locking the underlying tables (Yugo Nagata)

  • Allow ALTER INDEX to set statistics-gathering targets for expression indexes (Alexander Korotkov, Adrien Nayrat)

    In psql, \d+ now shows the statistics target for indexes.

  • Allow multiple tables to be specified in one VACUUM or ANALYZE command (Nathan Bossart)

    Also, if any table mentioned in VACUUM uses a column list, then the ANALYZE keyword must be supplied; previously, ANALYZE was implied in such cases.

  • Add parenthesized options syntax to ANALYZE (Nathan Bossart)

    This is similar to the syntax supported by VACUUM.

  • Add CREATE AGGREGATE option to specify the behavior of the aggregate's finalization function (Tom Lane)

    This is helpful for allowing user-defined aggregate functions to be optimized and to work as window functions.

  • Allow the creation of arrays of domains (Tom Lane)

    This also allows array_agg() to be used on domains.

  • Support domains over composite types (Tom Lane)

    Also allow PL/Perl, PL/Python, and PL/Tcl to handle composite-domain function arguments and results. Also improve PL/Python domain handling.

  • Add casts from JSONB scalars to numeric and boolean data types (Anastasia Lubennikova)

  • Add all window function framing options specified by SQL:2011 (Oliver Ford, Tom Lane)

    Specifically, allow RANGE mode to use PRECEDING and FOLLOWING to select rows having grouping values within plus or minus the specified offset. Add GROUPS mode to include plus or minus the number of peer groups. Frame exclusion syntax was also added.

  • Add SHA-2 family of hash functions (Peter Eisentraut)

    Specifically, sha224(), sha256(), sha384(), sha512() were added.

  • Add support for 64-bit non-cryptographic hash functions (Robert Haas, Amul Sul)

  • Allow to_char() and to_timestamp() to specify the time zone's offset from UTC in hours and minutes (Nikita Glukhov, Andrew Dunstan)

    This is done with format specifications TZH and TZM.

  • Add text search function websearch_to_tsquery() that supports a query syntax similar to that used by web search engines (Victor Drobny, Dmitry Ivanov)

  • Add functions json(b)_to_tsvector() to create a text search query for matching JSON/JSONB values (Dmitry Dolgov)

  • Add SQL-level procedures, which can start and commit their own transactions (Peter Eisentraut)

    They are created with the new CREATE PROCEDURE command and invoked via CALL.

    The new ALTER/DROP ROUTINE commands allow altering/dropping of all routine-like objects, including procedures, functions, and aggregates.

    Also, writing FUNCTION is now preferred over writing PROCEDURE in CREATE OPERATOR and CREATE TRIGGER, because the referenced object must be a function not a procedure. However, the old syntax is still accepted for compatibility.

  • Add transaction control to PL/pgSQL, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Tcl, and SPI server-side languages (Peter Eisentraut)

    Transaction control is only available within top-transaction-level procedures and nested DO and CALL blocks that only contain other DO and CALL blocks.

  • Add the ability to define PL/pgSQL composite-type variables as not null, constant, or with initial values (Tom Lane)

  • Allow PL/pgSQL to handle changes to composite types (e.g. record, row) that happen between the first and later function executions in the same session (Tom Lane)

    Previously, such circumstances generated errors.

  • Add extension jsonb_plpython to transform JSONB to/from PL/Python types (Anthony Bykov)

  • Add extension jsonb_plperl to transform JSONB to/from PL/Perl types (Anthony Bykov)

  • Change libpq to disable compression by default (Peter Eisentraut)

    Compression is already disabled in modern OpenSSL versions, so that the libpq setting had no effect with such libraries.

  • Add DO CONTINUE option to ecpg's WHENEVER statement (Vinayak Pokale)

    This generates a C continue statement, causing a return to the top of the contained loop when the specified condition occurs.

  • Add an ecpg mode to enable Oracle Pro*C-style handling of char arrays.

    This mode is enabled with -C.

  • Add psql command \gdesc to display the names and types of the columns in a query result (Pavel Stehule)

  • Add psql variables to report query activity and errors (Fabien Coelho)

    Specifically, the new variables are ERROR, SQLSTATE, ROW_COUNT, LAST_ERROR_MESSAGE, and LAST_ERROR_SQLSTATE.

  • Allow psql to test for the existence of a variable (Fabien Coelho)

    Specifically, the syntax :{?variable_name} allows a variable's existence to be tested in an \if statement.

  • Allow environment variable PSQL_PAGER to control psql's pager (Pavel Stehule)

    This allows psql's default pager to be specified as a separate environment variable from the pager for other applications. PAGER is still honored if PSQL_PAGER is not set.

  • Make psql's \d+ command always show the table's partitioning information (Amit Langote, Ashutosh Bapat)

    Previously, partition information would not be displayed for a partitioned table if it had no partitions. Also indicate which partitions are themselves partitioned.

  • Ensure that psql reports the proper user name when prompting for a password (Tom Lane)

    Previously, combinations of -U and a user name embedded in a URI caused incorrect reporting. Also suppress the user name before the password prompt when --password is specified.

  • Allow quit and exit to exit psql when given with no prior input (Bruce Momjian)

    Also print hints about how to exit when quit and exit are used alone on a line while the input buffer is not empty. Add a similar hint for help.

  • Make psql hint at using control-D when \q is entered alone on a line but ignored (Bruce Momjian)

    For example, \q does not exit when supplied in character strings.

  • Improve tab completion for ALTER INDEX RESET/SET (Masahiko Sawada)

  • Add infrastructure to allow psql to adapt its tab completion queries based on the server version (Tom Lane)

    Previously, tab completion queries could fail against older servers.

  • Add pgbench expression support for NULLs, booleans, and some functions and operators (Fabien Coelho)

  • Add \if conditional support to pgbench (Fabien Coelho)

  • Allow the use of non-ASCII characters in pgbench variable names (Fabien Coelho)

  • Add pgbench option --init-steps to control the initialization steps performed (Masahiko Sawada)

  • Add an approximately Zipfian-distributed random generator to pgbench (Alik Khilazhev)

  • Allow the random seed to be set in pgbench (Fabien Coelho)

  • Allow pgbench to do exponentiation with pow() and power() (Raúl Marín Rodríguez)

  • Add hashing functions to pgbench (Ildar Musin)

  • Make pgbench statistics more accurate when using --latency-limit and --rate (Fabien Coelho)

  • Add an option to pg_basebackup that creates a named replication slot (Michael Banck)

    The option --create-slot creates the named replication slot (--slot) when the WAL streaming method (--wal-method=stream) is used.

  • Allow initdb to set group read access to the data directory (David Steele)

    This is accomplished with the new initdb option --allow-group-access. Administrators can also set group permissions on the empty data directory before running initdb. Server variable data_directory_mode allows reading of data directory group permissions.

  • Add pg_verify_checksums tool to verify database checksums while offline (Magnus Hagander)

  • Allow pg_resetwal to change the WAL segment size via --wal-segsize (Nathan Bossart)

  • Add long options to pg_resetwal and pg_controldata (Nathan Bossart, Peter Eisentraut)

  • Add pg_receivewal option --no-sync to prevent synchronous WAL writes, for testing (Michael Paquier)

  • Add pg_receivewal option --endpos to specify when WAL receiving should stop (Michael Paquier)

  • Allow pg_ctl to send the SIGKILL signal to processes (Andres Freund)

    This was previously unsupported due to concerns over possible misuse.

  • Reduce the number of files copied by pg_rewind (Michael Paquier)

  • Prevent pg_rewind from running as root (Michael Paquier)

  • Add pg_dumpall option --encoding to control output encoding (Michael Paquier)

    pg_dump already had this option.

  • Add pg_dump option --load-via-partition-root to force loading of data into the partition's root table, rather than the original partition (Rushabh Lathia)

    This is useful if the system to be loaded to has different collation definitions or endianness, possibly requiring rows to be stored in different partitions than previously.

  • Add an option to suppress dumping and restoring database object comments (Robins Tharakan)

    The new pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and pg_restore option is --no-comments.

  • Add PGXS support for installing include files (Andrew Gierth)

    This supports creating extension modules that depend on other modules. Formerly there was no easy way for the dependent module to find the referenced one's include files. Several existing contrib modules that define data types have been adjusted to install relevant files. Also, PL/Perl and PL/Python now install their include files, to support creation of transform modules for those languages.

  • Install errcodes.txt to allow extensions to access the list of error codes known to PostgreSQL (Thomas Munro)

  • Convert documentation to DocBook XML (Peter Eisentraut, Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz)

    The file names still use an sgml extension for compatibility with back branches.

  • Use stdbool.h to define type bool on platforms where it's suitable, which is most (Peter Eisentraut)

    This eliminates a coding hazard for extension modules that need to include stdbool.h.

  • Overhaul the way that initial system catalog contents are defined (John Naylor)

    The initial data is now represented in Perl data structures, making it much easier to manipulate mechanically.

  • Prevent extensions from creating custom server parameters that take a quoted list of values (Tom Lane)

    This cannot be supported at present because knowledge of the parameter's property would be required even before the extension is loaded.

  • Add ability to use channel binding when using SCRAM authentication (Michael Paquier)

    Channel binding is intended to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, but SCRAM cannot prevent them unless it can be forced to be active. Unfortunately, there is no way to do that in libpq. Support for it is expected in future versions of libpq and in interfaces not built using libpq, e.g. JDBC.

  • Allow background workers to attach to databases that normally disallow connections (Magnus Hagander)

  • Add support for hardware CRC calculations on ARMv8 (Yuqi Gu, Heikki Linnakangas, Thomas Munro)

  • Speed up lookups of built-in functions by OID (Andres Freund)

    The previous binary search has been replaced by a lookup array.

  • Speed up construction of query results (Andres Freund)

  • Improve speed of access to system caches (Andres Freund)

  • Add a generational memory allocator which is optimized for serial allocation/deallocation (Tomas Vondra)

    This reduces memory usage for logical decoding.

  • Make the computation of pg_class.reltuples by VACUUM consistent with its computation by ANALYZE (Tomas Vondra)

  • Update to use perltidy version 20170521 (Tom Lane, Peter Eisentraut)

  • Allow extension pg_prewarm to restore the previous shared buffer contents on startup (Mithun Cy, Robert Haas)

    This is accomplished by having pg_prewarm store the shared buffers' relation and block number data to disk occasionally during server operation, and at shutdown.

  • Add pg_trgm function strict_word_similarity() to compute the similarity of whole words (Alexander Korotkov)

    The function word_similarity() already existed for this purpose, but it was designed to find similar parts of words, while strict_word_similarity() computes the similarity to whole words.

  • Allow btree_gin to index bool, bpchar, name and uuid data types (Matheus Oliveira)

  • Allow cube and seg extensions to perform index-only scans using GiST indexes (Andrey Borodin)

  • Allow retrieval of negative cube coordinates using the ~> operator (Alexander Korotkov)

    This is useful for KNN-GiST searches when looking for coordinates in descending order.

  • Add Vietnamese letter handling to the unaccent extension (Dang Minh Huong, Michael Paquier)

  • Enhance amcheck to check that each heap tuple has an index entry (Peter Geoghegan)

  • Have adminpack use the new default file system access roles (Stephen Frost)

    Previously, only superusers could call adminpack functions; now role permissions are checked.

  • Widen pg_stat_statement's query ID to 64 bits (Robert Haas)

    This greatly reduces the chance of query ID hash collisions. The query ID can now potentially display as a negative value.

  • Remove the contrib/start-scripts/osx scripts since they are no longer recommended (use contrib/start-scripts/macos instead) (Tom Lane)

  • Remove the chkpass extension (Peter Eisentraut)

    This extension is no longer considered to be a usable security tool or example of how to write an extension.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11.1 released on 2018-11-08 - docs

  • Ensure proper quoting of transition table names when pg_dump emits CREATE TRIGGER ... REFERENCING commands (Tom Lane)

    This oversight could be exploited by an unprivileged user to gain superuser privileges during the next dump/reload or pg_upgrade run. (CVE-2018-16850)

  • Apply the tablespace specified for a partitioned index when creating a child index (Álvaro Herrera)

    Previously, child indexes were always created in the default tablespace.

  • Fix NULL handling in parallel hashed multi-batch left joins (Andrew Gierth, Thomas Munro)

    Outer-relation rows with null values of the hash key were omitted from the join result.

  • Fix incorrect processing of an array-type coercion expression appearing within a CASE clause that has a constant test expression (Tom Lane)

  • Fix incorrect expansion of tuples lacking recently-added columns (Andrew Dunstan, Amit Langote)

    This is known to lead to crashes in triggers on tables with recently-added columns, and could have other symptoms as well.

  • Fix bugs with named or defaulted arguments in CALL argument lists (Tom Lane, Pavel Stehule)

  • Fix strictness check for strict aggregates with ORDER BY columns (Andrew Gierth, Andres Freund)

    The strictness logic incorrectly ignored rows for which the ORDER BY value(s) were null.

  • Disable recheck_on_update optimization (Tom Lane)

    This new-in-v11 feature turns out not to have been ready for prime time. Disable it until something can be done about it.

  • Prevent creation of a partition in a trigger attached to its parent table (Amit Langote)

    Ideally we'd allow that, but for the moment it has to be blocked to avoid crashes.

  • Fix problems with applying ON COMMIT DELETE ROWS to a partitioned temporary table (Amit Langote)

  • Fix pg_verify_checksums's determination of which files to check the checksums of (Michael Paquier)

    In some cases it complained about files that are not expected to have checksums.

  • In contrib/pg_stat_statements, disallow the pg_read_all_stats role from executing pg_stat_statements_reset() (Haribabu Kommi)

    pg_read_all_stats is only meant to grant permission to read statistics, not to change them, so this grant was incorrect.

    To cause this change to take effect, run ALTER EXTENSION pg_stat_statements UPDATE in each database where pg_stat_statements has been installed. (A database freshly created in 11.0 should not need this, but a database upgraded from a previous release probably still contains the old version of pg_stat_statements. The UPDATE command is harmless if the module was already updated.)

  • Rename red-black tree support functions to use rbt prefix not rb prefix (Tom Lane)

    This avoids name collisions with Ruby functions, which broke PL/Ruby. It's hoped that there are no other affected extensions.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11.2 released on 2019-02-14 - docs

  • Fix handling of unique indexes with INCLUDE columns on partitioned tables (Álvaro Herrera)

    The uniqueness condition was not checked properly in such cases.

  • Ensure that NOT NULL constraints of a partitioned table are honored within its partitions (Álvaro Herrera, Amit Langote)

  • Update catalog state correctly for partition table constraints when detaching their partition (Amit Langote, Álvaro Herrera)

    Previously, the pg_constraint.conislocal field for such a constraint might improperly be left as false, rendering it undroppable. A dump/restore or pg_upgrade would cure the problem, but if necessary, the catalog field can be adjusted manually.

  • Create or delete foreign key enforcement triggers correctly when attaching or detaching a partition in a partitioned table that has a foreign-key constraint (Amit Langote, Álvaro Herrera)

  • Avoid useless creation of duplicate foreign key constraints in partitioned tables (Álvaro Herrera)

  • When an index is created on a partitioned table using ONLY, and there are no partitions yet, mark it valid immediately (Álvaro Herrera)

    Otherwise there is no way to make it become valid.

  • Use a safe table lock level when detaching a partition (Álvaro Herrera)

    The previous locking level was too weak and might allow concurrent DDL on the table, with bad results.

  • Fix problems with applying ON COMMIT DROP and ON COMMIT DELETE ROWS to partitioned tables and tables with inheritance children (Michael Paquier)

  • Disallow COPY FREEZE on partitioned tables (David Rowley)

    This should eventually be made to work, but it may require a patch that's too complicated to risk back-patching.

  • Fix possible index corruption when the indexed column has a “fast default” (that is, it was added by ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN with a constant non-NULL default value specified, after the table already contained some rows) (Andres Freund)

  • Correctly adjust “fast default” values during ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN TYPE (Andrew Dunstan)

  • Avoid deadlock between GIN vacuuming and concurrent index insertions (Alexander Korotkov, Andrey Borodin, Peter Geoghegan)

    This change partially reverts a performance improvement, introduced in version 10.0, that attempted to reduce the number of index pages locked during deletion of a GIN posting tree page. That's now been found to lead to deadlocks, so we've removed it pending closer analysis.

  • Prevent incorrect use of WAL-skipping optimization during COPY to a view or foreign table (Amit Langote, Michael Paquier)

  • Fix crash when zero rows are fed to json[b]_populate_recordset() or json[b]_to_recordset() (Tom Lane)

  • Fix incorrect JIT tuple deforming code for tables with many columns (more than approximately 800) (Andres Freund)

  • Fix performance and memory leakage issues in hash-based grouping (Andres Freund)

  • Fix parsing of collation-sensitive expressions in the arguments of a CALL statement (Peter Eisentraut)

  • Ensure proper cleanup after detecting an error in the argument list of a CALL statement (Tom Lane)

  • Fix incorrect planning of queries involving nested loops both above and below a Gather plan node (Tom Lane)

    If both levels of nestloop needed to pass the same variable into their right-hand sides, an incorrect plan would be generated.

  • Fix planner failure when the first column of a row comparison matches an index column, but later column(s) do not, and the index has included (non-key) columns (Tom Lane)

  • Improve planning speed for large inheritance or partitioning table groups (Amit Langote, Etsuro Fujita)

  • Process ALTER TABLE ONLY ADD COLUMN IF NOT EXISTS correctly (Greg Stark)

  • Prevent use of a session's temporary schema within a two-phase transaction (Michael Paquier)

    Accessing a temporary table within such a transaction has been forbidden for a long time, but it was still possible to cause problems with other operations on temporary objects.

  • Ensure relation caches are updated properly after adding or removing foreign key constraints (Álvaro Herrera)

    This oversight could result in existing sessions failing to enforce a newly-created constraint, or continuing to enforce a dropped one.

  • Fix replay of GiST index micro-vacuum operations so that concurrent hot-standby queries do not see inconsistent state (Alexander Korotkov)

  • Fix parsing of space-separated lists of host names in the ldapserver parameter of LDAP authentication entries in pg_hba.conf (Thomas Munro)

  • When making a PAM authentication request, don't set the PAM_RHOST variable if the connection is via a Unix socket (Thomas Munro)

    Previously that variable would be set to [local], which is at best unhelpful, since it's supposed to be a host name.

  • Make pgbench's random number generation fully deterministic and platform-independent when --random-seed=N is specified (Fabien Coelho, Tom Lane)

    On any specific platform, the sequence obtained with a particular value of N will probably be different from what it was before this patch.

  • Fix pg_basebackup and pg_verify_checksums to ignore temporary files appropriately (Michael Banck, Michael Paquier)

  • Make pg_dump include ALTER INDEX SET STATISTICS commands (Michael Paquier)

    When the ability to attach statistics targets to index expressions was added, we forgot to teach pg_dump about it, so that such settings were lost in dump/reload.

  • Fix pg_dump's dumping of tables that have OIDs (Peter Eisentraut)

    The WITH OIDS clause was omitted if it needed to be applied to the first table to be dumped.

  • Prevent false index-corruption reports from contrib/amcheck caused by inline-compressed data (Peter Geoghegan)

  • Properly disregard SIGPIPE errors if COPY FROM PROGRAM stops reading the program's output early (Tom Lane)

    This case isn't actually reachable directly with COPY, but it can happen when using contrib/file_fdw.

  • In configure, look for python3 and then python2 if python isn't found (Peter Eisentraut)

    This allows PL/Python to be configured without explicitly specifying PYTHON on platforms that no longer provide an unversioned python executable.

  • Include JIT-related headers in the installed set of header files (Donald Dong)

  • Relocate call of set_rel_pathlist_hook so that extensions can use it to supply partial paths for parallel queries (KaiGai Kohei)

    This is not expected to affect existing use-cases.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11.3 released on 2019-05-09 - docs

  • Avoid access to already-freed memory during partition routing error reports (Michael Paquier)

    This mistake could lead to a crash, and in principle it might be possible to use it to disclose server memory contents. (CVE-2019-10129)

  • Avoid catalog corruption when an ALTER TABLE on a partitioned table finds that a partitioned index is reusable (Amit Langote, Tom Lane)

    This occurs, for example, when ALTER COLUMN TYPE finds that no physical table rewrite is required.

  • Avoid catalog corruption when a temporary table with ON COMMIT DROP and an identity column is created in a single-statement transaction (Peter Eisentraut)

    This hazard was overlooked because the case is not actually useful, since the temporary table would be dropped immediately after creation.

  • Fix failure in ALTER INDEX ... ATTACH PARTITION if the partitioned table contains more dropped columns than its partition does (Álvaro Herrera)

  • Fix failure to attach a partition's existing index to a newly-created partitioned index in some cases (Amit Langote, Álvaro Herrera)

    This would lead to errors such as “index ... not found in partition” in subsequent DDL that uses the partitioned index.

  • Avoid crash when an EPQ recheck is performed for a partitioned query result relation (Amit Langote)

    This occurs when using READ COMMITTED isolation level and another session has concurrently updated some of the target row(s).

  • Fix tuple routing in multi-level partitioned tables that have dropped attributes (Amit Langote, Michael Paquier)

  • Fix failure when the slow path of foreign key constraint initial validation is applied to partitioned tables (Hadi Moshayedi, Tom Lane, Andres Freund)

    This didn't manifest except in the uncommon cases where the fast path can't be used (such as permissions problems).

  • When accessing a partition directly, and constraint_exclusion is set to on, use the partition's partition constraint as well as any CHECK constraints for exclusion checking (Amit Langote, Tom Lane)

    This change restores the behavior to what it was in v10.

  • Avoid server crash when an error occurs while trying to persist a cursor query across a transaction commit (Tom Lane)

    If a procedure attempts to commit while it has an open explicit or implicit cursor (for example, a PL/pgSQL FOR-loop query), the cursor must be executed to completion and its results saved before the transaction commit can be performed. An error occurring during such execution led to a crash.

  • Avoid throwing incorrect errors for updates of temporary tables and unlogged tables when a FOR ALL TABLES publication exists (Peter Eisentraut)

    Such tables should be ignored for publication purposes, but some parts of the code failed to do so.

  • Avoid possible division-by-zero in btree index vacuum logic (Piotr Stefaniak, Alexander Korotkov)

    This could lead to incorrect decisions about whether index cleanup is needed.

  • Avoid counting parallel workers' transactions as separate transactions (Haribabu Kommi)

  • Fix possible crash while executing a SHOW command in a replication connection (Michael Paquier)

  • Avoid server memory leak when fetching rows from a portal one at a time (Tom Lane)

  • Avoid memory leak when a partition's relation cache entry is rebuilt (Amit Langote, Tom Lane)

  • Report correct relation name in autovacuum's pg_stat_activity display during BRIN summarize operations (Álvaro Herrera)

  • Avoid crash when trying to plan a partition-wise join when GEQO is active (Tom Lane)

  • Fix misplanning of queries in which a set-returning function is applied to a relation that is provably empty (Tom Lane, Julien Rouhaud)

    In v10, this oversight only led to slightly inefficient plans, but in v11 it could cause “set-valued function called in context that cannot accept a set” errors.

  • Fix planner's parallel-safety assessment for grouped queries (Etsuro Fujita)

    Previously, target-list evaluation work that could have been parallelized might not be.

  • Fix mishandling of “included” index columns in planner's unique-index logic (Tom Lane)

    This could result in failing to recognize that a unique index with included columns proves uniqueness of a query result, leading to a poor plan.

  • Fix incorrect strictness check for array coercion expressions (Tom Lane)

    This might allow, for example, incorrect inlining of a strict SQL function, leading to non-enforcement of the strictness condition.

  • Speed up planning when there are many equality conditions and many potentially-relevant foreign key constraints (David Rowley)

  • Fix corner-case server crashes in dynamic shared memory allocation (Thomas Munro, Robert Haas)

  • Fix possible “could not access status of transaction” failures in txid_status() (Thomas Munro)

  • Fix authentication failure when attempting to use SCRAM authentication with mixed OpenSSL library versions (Michael Paquier, Peter Eisentraut)

    If libpq is using OpenSSL 1.0.1 or older while the server is using OpenSSL 1.0.2 or newer, the negotiation of which SASL mechanism to use went wrong, leading to a confusing “channel binding not supported by this build” error message.

  • Create the current_logfiles file with the same permissions as other files in the server's data directory (Haribabu Kommi)

    Previously it used the permissions specified by log_file_mode, but that can cause problems for backup utilities.

  • Fix pg_rewind failures due to failure to remove some transient files in the target data directory (Michael Paquier)

  • Make pg_verify_checksums verify that the data directory it's pointed at is of the right PostgreSQL version (Michael Paquier)

  • Avoid crash in contrib/postgres_fdw when a query using remote grouping or aggregation has a SELECT-list item that is an uncorrelated sub-select, outer reference, or parameter symbol (Tom Lane)

  • Change contrib/postgres_fdw to report an error when a remote partition chosen to insert a routed row into is also an UPDATE subplan target that will be updated later in the same command (Amit Langote, Etsuro Fujita)

    Previously, such situations led to server crashes or incorrect results of the UPDATE. Allowing such cases to work correctly is a matter for future work.

  • In contrib/pg_prewarm, avoid indefinitely respawning background worker processes if prewarming fails for some reason (Mithun Cy)

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11.4 released on 2019-06-20 - docs

  • Fix buffer-overflow hazards in SCRAM verifier parsing (Jonathan Katz, Heikki Linnakangas, Michael Paquier)

    Any authenticated user could cause a stack-based buffer overflow by changing their own password to a purpose-crafted value. In addition to the ability to crash the PostgreSQL server, this could suffice for executing arbitrary code as the PostgreSQL operating system account.

    A similar overflow hazard existed in libpq, which could allow a rogue server to crash a client or perhaps execute arbitrary code as the client's operating system account.

    The PostgreSQL Project thanks Alexander Lakhin for reporting this problem. (CVE-2019-10164)

  • Fix assorted errors in run-time partition pruning logic (Tom Lane, Amit Langote, David Rowley)

    These mistakes could lead to wrong answers in queries on partitioned tables, if the comparison value used for pruning is dynamically determined, or if multiple range-partitioned columns are involved in pruning decisions, or if stable (not immutable) comparison operators are involved.

  • Fix possible crash while trying to copy trigger definitions to a new partition (Tom Lane)

  • Prevent possible memory clobber when there are duplicate columns in a hash aggregate's hash key list (Andrew Gierth)

  • Fix incorrect argument null-ness checking during partial aggregation of aggregates with zero or multiple arguments (David Rowley, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Andres Freund)

  • Fix faulty generation of merge-append plans (Tom Lane)

    This mistake could lead to “could not find pathkey item to sort” errors.

  • Fix conversion of JSON string literals to JSON-type output columns in json_to_record() and json_populate_record() (Tom Lane)

    Such cases should produce the literal as a standalone JSON value, but the code misbehaved if the literal contained any characters requiring escaping.

  • Avoid writing an invalid empty btree index page in the unlikely case that a failure occurs while processing INCLUDEd columns during a page split (Peter Geoghegan)

    The invalid page would not affect normal index operations, but it might cause failures in subsequent VACUUMs. If that has happened to one of your indexes, recover by reindexing the index.

  • Fix unsafe coding in walreceiver's signal handler (Tom Lane)

    This avoids rare problems in which the walreceiver process would crash or deadlock when commanded to shut down.

  • Fix ordering of GRANT commands emitted by pg_dump and pg_dumpall for databases and tablespaces (Nathan Bossart, Michael Paquier)

    If cascading grants had been issued, restore might fail due to the GRANT commands being given in an order that didn't respect their interdependencies.

  • Make pg_dump recreate table partitions using CREATE TABLE then ATTACH PARTITION, rather than including PARTITION OF in the creation command (Álvaro Herrera, David Rowley)

    This avoids problems with the partition's column order possibly being changed to match the parent's. Also, a partition is now restorable from the dump (as a standalone table) even if its parent table isn't restored; the ATTACH will fail, but that can just be ignored.

  • Fix contrib/auto_explain to not cause problems in parallel queries (Tom Lane)

    Previously, a parallel worker might try to log its query even if the parent query were not being logged by auto_explain. This would work sometimes, but it's confusing, and in some cases it resulted in failures like “could not find key N in shm TOC”.

    Also, fix an off-by-one error that resulted in not necessarily logging every query even when the sampling rate is set to 1.0.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11.5 released on 2019-08-08 - docs

  • Fix execution of hashed subplans that require cross-type comparison (Tom Lane, Andreas Seltenreich)

    Hashed subplans used the outer query's original comparison operator to compare entries of the hash table. This is the wrong thing if that operator is cross-type, since all the hash table entries will be of the subquery's output type. For the set of hashable cross-type operators in core PostgreSQL, this mistake seems nearly harmless on 64-bit machines, but it can result in crashes or perhaps unauthorized disclosure of server memory on 32-bit machines. Extensions might provide hashable cross-type operators that create larger risks. (CVE-2019-10209)

  • Prevent dropping a partitioned table's trigger if there are pending trigger events in child partitions (Álvaro Herrera)

    This notably applies to foreign key constraints, since those are implemented by triggers.

  • Include user-specified trigger arguments when copying a trigger definition from a partitioned table to one of its partitions (Patrick McHardy)

  • Install dependencies to prevent dropping partition key columns (Tom Lane)

    ALTER TABLE ... DROP COLUMN will refuse to drop a column that is a partition key column. However, indirect drops (such as a cascade from dropping a key column's data type) had no such check, allowing the deletion of a key column. This resulted in a badly broken partitioned table that could neither be accessed nor dropped.

    This fix adds pg_depend entries that enforce that the whole partitioned table, not just the key column, will be dropped if a cascaded drop forces removal of the key column. However, such entries will only be created when a partitioned table is created; so this fix does not remove the risk for pre-existing partitioned tables. The issue can only arise for partition key columns of non-built-in data types, so it seems not to be a hazard for most users.

  • Ensure that column numbers are correctly mapped between a partitioned table and its default partition (Amit Langote)

    Some operations misbehaved if the mapping wasn't exactly one-to-one, for example if there were dropped columns in one table and not the other.

  • Ignore partitions that are foreign tables when creating indexes on partitioned tables (Álvaro Herrera)

    Previously an error was thrown on encountering a foreign-table partition, but that's unhelpful and doesn't protect against any actual problem.

  • Prune a partitioned table's default partition (that is, avoid uselessly scanning it) in more cases (Yuzuko Hosoya)

  • Fix possible failure to prune partitions when there are multiple partition key columns of boolean type (David Rowley)

  • Don't optimize away GROUP BY columns when the table involved is an inheritance parent (David Rowley)

    Normally, if a table's primary key column(s) are included in GROUP BY, it's safe to drop any other grouping columns, since the primary key columns are enough to make the groups unique. This rule does not work if the query is also reading inheritance child tables, though; the parent's uniqueness does not extend to the children.

  • Avoid incorrect use of parallel hash join for semi-join queries (Thomas Munro)

    This error resulted in duplicate result rows from some EXISTS queries.

  • Fix possible failure of planner's index endpoint probes (Tom Lane)

    When using a recently-created index to determine the minimum or maximum value of a column, the planner could select a recently-dead tuple that does not actually contain the endpoint value. In the worst case the tuple might contain a null, resulting in a visible error “found unexpected null value in index”; more likely we would just end up using the wrong value, degrading the quality of planning estimates.

  • Fix failure to access trigger transition tables during EvalPlanQual rechecks (Alex Aktsipetrov)

    Triggers that rely on transition tables sometimes failed in the presence of concurrent updates.

  • Don't build extended statistics for inheritance trees (Tomas Vondra)

    This avoids a “tuple already updated by self” error during ANALYZE.

  • Avoid spurious deadlock errors when upgrading a tuple lock (Oleksii Kliukin)

    When two or more transactions are waiting for a transaction T1 to release a tuple-level lock, and T1 upgrades its lock to a higher level, a spurious deadlock among the waiting transactions could be reported when T1 finishes.

  • Fix failure to resolve deadlocks involving multiple parallel worker processes (Rui Hai Jiang)

    It is not clear whether this bug is reachable with non-artificial queries, but if it did happen, the queries involved in an otherwise-resolvable deadlock would block until canceled.

  • Fix printing of BTREE_META_CLEANUP WAL records (Michael Paquier)

  • Prevent assertion failures due to mishandling of version-2 btree metapages (Peter Geoghegan)

  • Ensure that a record or row value returned from a PL/pgSQL function is marked with the function's declared composite type (Tom Lane)

    This avoids problems if the result is stored directly into a table.

  • In psql, avoid offering incorrect tab completion options after SET variable = (Tom Lane)

  • Fix a small memory leak in psql's \d command (Tom Lane)

  • Fix possible lockup in pgbench when using -R option (Fabien Coelho)

  • Improve reliability of contrib/amcheck's index verification (Peter Geoghegan)

  • Fix handling of Perl undef values in contrib/jsonb_plperl (Ivan Panchenko)

  • Improve stability of src/test/kerberos and src/test/ldap regression tests (Thomas Munro, Tom Lane)

  • Improve stability of src/test/recovery regression tests (Michael Paquier)

  • Fix pgbench regression tests to work on Windows (Fabien Coelho)

  • Fix TAP tests to work with msys Perl, in cases where the build directory is on a non-root msys mount point (Noah Misch)

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11.6 released on 2019-11-14 - docs

  • Fix failure of ALTER TABLE SET with a custom relation option (Michael Paquier)

  • Avoid failure if the same target table is specified twice in an ANALYZE command inside a transaction block (Tom Lane)

  • SET CONSTRAINTS ... DEFERRED failed on partitioned tables, incorrectly complaining about lack of triggers (Álvaro Herrera)

  • Fix failure when creating indexes for a partition, if the parent partitioned table contains any dropped columns (Michael Paquier)

  • Fix planner's test for case-foldable characters in ILIKE with an ICU collation (Tom Lane)

    This mistake caused the planner to treat too much of the pattern as being a fixed prefix, so that indexscans derived from an ILIKE clause might miss entries that they should find.

  • Fix crash if x = ANY (array), or related operations, contains a constant-null array (Tom Lane)

  • Fix “unexpected relkind” error when a query tries to access a TOAST table (John Hsu, Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)

    The error should say that permission is denied, but this case got broken during code refactoring.

  • Avoid an unnecessary catalog lookup during heap page pruning (Thomas Munro)

    It's no longer necessary to check for unlogged indexes here, and the check caused significant performance problems in some workloads. There was also at least a theoretical possibility of deadlock.

  • Avoid creating unnecessarily-bulky tuple stores for window functions (Andrew Gierth)

    In some cases the tuple storage would include all columns of the source table(s), not just the ones that are needed by the query.

  • Fix failure to JIT-compile equality comparisons for grouping hash tables, leading to performance loss (Andres Freund)

  • Fix logical replication failure when publisher and subscriber have different ideas about a table's replica identity columns (Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais, Peter Eisentraut)

    Declaring a column as part of the replica identity on the subscriber, when it does not exist at all on the publisher, led to “negative bitmapset member not allowed” errors.

  • Fix timeout handling in logical replication walreceiver processes (Julien Rouhaud)

    Erroneous logic prevented wal_receiver_timeout from working in logical replication deployments.

  • Restore the ability to take type information from an AS clause in json[b]_populate_record() and json[b]_populate_recordset() (Tom Lane)

    If the record argument is NULL and has no declared composite type, try to use the AS clause instead. This isn't recommended usage, but it used to work, and now does again.

  • Avoid crash when selecting a namespace node in XMLTABLE (Chapman Flack)

  • Fix memory leaks in lower(), upper(), and initcap() functions when using ICU collations (Konstantin Knizhnik)

  • Avoid crashes if ispell text search dictionaries contain wrong affix data (Arthur Zakirov)

  • In pg_basebackup, don't fsync output files until the end of backup (Michael Paquier)

    The previous coding could result in timeout failures if fsync was slow.

  • Fix PL/pgSQL to handle replacements of composite types better (Tom Lane)

    Cover the case where a composite type is dropped entirely, and then a new type of the same name is created, between executions of a PL/pgSQL function. Variables of the composite type will now update to match the new definition.

  • Fix contrib/amcheck to skip unlogged indexes during hot standby (Andrey Borodin, Peter Geoghegan)

    An unlogged index won't necessarily contain valid data in this context, so don't try to check it.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11.7 released on 2020-02-13 - docs

  • Add missing permissions checks for ALTER ... DEPENDS ON EXTENSION (Álvaro Herrera)

    Marking an object as dependent on an extension did not have any privilege check whatsoever. This oversight allowed any user to mark routines, triggers, materialized views, or indexes as droppable by anyone able to drop an extension. Require that the calling user own the specified object (and hence have privilege to drop it). (CVE-2020-1720)

  • Ensure that row triggers on partitioned tables are correctly cloned to sub-partitions when appropriate (Álvaro Herrera)

    User-defined triggers (but not triggers for foreign key or deferred unique constraints) might be missed when creating or attaching a partition.

  • Fix logical replication subscriber code to execute per-column UPDATE triggers when appropriate (Peter Eisentraut)

  • Fix possible crash or data corruption when a logical replication subscriber processes a row update (Tom Lane, Tomas Vondra)

    This bug caused visible problems only if the subscriber's table contained columns that were not being copied from the publisher and had pass-by-reference data types.

  • Fix crash in logical replication subscriber after DDL changes on a subscribed relation (Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais, Vignesh C)

  • Ensure that the effect of pg_replication_slot_advance() on a physical replication slot will persist across restarts (Alexey Kondratov, Michael Paquier)

  • Improve efficiency of logical replication with REPLICA IDENTITY FULL (Konstantin Knizhnik)

    When searching for an existing tuple during an update or delete operation, return the first matching tuple not the last one.

  • Ensure parallel plans are always shut down at the correct time (Kyotaro Horiguchi)

    This oversight is known to result in “temporary file leak” warnings from multi-batch parallel hash joins.

  • Prevent premature shutdown of a Gather or GatherMerge plan node that is underneath a Limit node (Amit Kapila)

    This avoids failure if such a plan node needs to be scanned more than once, as for instance if it is on the inside of a nestloop.

  • Improve efficiency of parallel hash join on CPUs with many cores (Gang Deng, Thomas Munro)

  • Avoid crash in parallel CREATE INDEX when there are no free dynamic shared memory slots (Thomas Munro)

    Fall back to a non-parallel index build, instead.

  • Fix failure to insert default values for “missing” attributes during tuple conversion (Vik Fearing, Andrew Gierth)

    This could result in values incorrectly reading as NULL, when they come from columns that had been added by ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN with a constant default.

  • Fix crash after FileClose() failure (Noah Misch)

    This issue could only be observed with data_sync_retry enabled, since otherwise FileClose() failure would be reported as a PANIC.

  • Ensure that walsender processes always show NULL for transaction start time in pg_stat_activity (Álvaro Herrera)

    Previously, the xact_start column would sometimes show the process start time.

  • Fix placement of “Subplans Removed” field in EXPLAIN output (Daniel Gustafsson, Tom Lane)

    In non-text output formats, this field was emitted inside the “Plans” sub-group, resulting in syntactically invalid output. Attach it to the parent Append or MergeAppend plan node as intended. This causes the field to change position in text output format too: if there are any InitPlans attached to the same plan node, “Subplans Removed” will now appear before those.

  • Allow the planner to apply potentially-leaky tests to child-table statistics, if the user can read the corresponding column of the table that's actually named in the query (Dilip Kumar, Amit Langote)

    This change fixes a performance problem for partitioned tables that was created by the fix for CVE-2017-7484. That security fix disallowed applying leaky operators to statistics for columns that the current user doesn't have permission to read directly. However, it's somewhat common to grant permissions only on the parent partitioned table and not bother to do so on individual partitions. In such cases, the user can read the column via the parent, so there's no point in this security restriction; it only results in poorer planner estimates than necessary.

  • Ignore system columns when applying most-common-value extended statistics (Tomas Vondra)

    This prevents “negative bitmapset member not allowed” planner errors for affected queries.

  • Fix BRIN index logic to support hypothetical BRIN indexes (Julien Rouhaud, Heikki Linnakangas)

    Previously, if an “index adviser” extension tried to get the planner to produce a plan involving a hypothetical BRIN index, that would fail, because the BRIN cost estimation code would always try to physically access the index's metapage. Now it checks to see if the index is only hypothetical, and uses default assumptions about the index parameters if so.

  • Disallow partition key expressions that return pseudo-types, such as record (Tom Lane)

  • Ensure that data types and collations used in XMLTABLE constructs are accounted for when computing dependencies of a view or rule (Tom Lane)

    Previously it was possible to break a view using XMLTABLE by dropping a type, if the type was not otherwise referenced in the view. This fix does not correct the dependencies already recorded for existing views, only for newly-created ones.

  • Prevent unwanted downcasing and truncation of RADIUS authentication parameters (Marcos David)

    The pg_hba.conf parser mistakenly treated these fields as SQL identifiers, which in general they aren't.

  • Transmit incoming NOTIFY messages to the client before sending ReadyForQuery, rather than after (Tom Lane)

    This change ensures that, with libpq and other client libraries that act similarly to it, any notifications received during a transaction will be available by the time the client thinks the transaction is complete. This probably makes no difference in practical applications (which would need to cope with asynchronous notifications in any case); but it makes it easier to build test cases with reproducible behavior.

  • Cope with changes of the specific type referenced by a PL/pgSQL composite-type variable in more cases (Ashutosh Sharma, Tom Lane)

    Dropping and re-creating the composite type referenced by a PL/pgSQL variable could lead to “could not open relation with OID NNNN” errors.

  • Avoid crash in postgres_fdw when trying to send a command like UPDATE remote_tab SET (x,y) = (SELECT ...) to the remote server (Tom Lane)

  • Fix configure's probe for OpenSSL's SSL_clear_options() function so that it works with OpenSSL versions before 1.1.0 (Michael Paquier, Daniel Gustafsson)

    This problem could lead to failure to set the SSL compression option as desired, when PostgreSQL is built against an old version of OpenSSL.

  • Avoid memory leak in sanity checks for “slab” memory contexts (Tomas Vondra)

    This isn't an issue for production builds, since they wouldn't ordinarily have memory context checking enabled; but the leak could be quite severe in a debug build.

  • Fix multiple statistics entries reported by the LWLock statistics mechanism (Fujii Masao)

    The LWLock statistics code (which is not built by default; it requires compiling with -DLWLOCK_STATS) could report multiple entries for the same LWLock and backend process, as a result of faulty hashtable key creation.

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