Upgrading from 9.6.8 to 11.8 gives you 2.2 years worth of fixes (912 of them)

List of changes:

• ⇑ 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 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 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.

  • 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)

  • 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)

  • 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)

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

  • 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.

• ⇑ 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 volatility markings on a few built-in functions (Thomas Munro, Tom Lane)

    The functions query_to_xml, cursor_to_xml, cursor_to_xmlschema, query_to_xmlschema, and query_to_xml_and_xmlschema should be marked volatile because they execute user-supplied queries that might contain volatile operations. They were not, leading to a risk of incorrect query optimization. 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, but in case of trouble, it can be fixed by manually updating these functions' pg_proc entries, for example ALTER FUNCTION pg_catalog.query_to_xml(text, boolean, boolean, text) VOLATILE. (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.

  • 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.

  • Avoid re-using TOAST value OIDs that match dead-but-not-yet-vacuumed TOAST entries (Pavan Deolasee)

    Once the OID counter has wrapped around, it's possible to assign a TOAST value whose OID matches a previously deleted entry in the same TOAST table. If that entry were not yet vacuumed away, this resulted in “unexpected chunk number 0 (expected 1) for toast value nnnnn” errors, which would persist until the dead entry was removed by VACUUM. Fix by not selecting such OIDs when creating a new TOAST entry.

  • 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)

  • Change ANALYZE's algorithm for updating pg_class.reltuples (David Gould)

    Previously, pages not actually scanned by ANALYZE were assumed to retain their old tuple density. In a large table where ANALYZE samples only a small fraction of the pages, this meant that the overall tuple density estimate could not change very much, so that reltuples would change nearly proportionally to changes in the table's physical size (relpages) regardless of what was actually happening in the table. This has been observed to result in reltuples becoming so much larger than reality as to effectively shut off autovacuuming. To fix, assume that ANALYZE's sample is a statistically unbiased sample of the table (as it should be), and just extrapolate the density observed within those pages to the whole table.

  • 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.

  • Avoid deadlocks in concurrent CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY commands that are run under SERIALIZABLE or REPEATABLE READ transaction isolation (Tom Lane)

  • Fix possible slow execution of REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW CONCURRENTLY (Thomas Munro)

  • Fix UPDATE/DELETE ... WHERE CURRENT OF to not fail when the referenced cursor uses an index-only-scan plan (Yugo Nagata, Tom Lane)

  • Fix incorrect planning of join clauses pushed into parameterized paths (Andrew Gierth, Tom Lane)

    This error could result in misclassifying a condition as a “join filter” for an outer join when it should be a plain “filter” condition, leading to incorrect join output.

  • Fix possibly incorrect generation of an index-only-scan plan when the same table column appears in multiple index columns, and only some of those index columns use operator classes that can return the column value (Kyotaro Horiguchi)

  • Fix misoptimization of CHECK constraints having provably-NULL subclauses of top-level AND/OR conditions (Tom Lane, Dean Rasheed)

    This could, for example, allow constraint exclusion to exclude a child table that should not be excluded from a query.

  • 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)

  • Avoid crash if a table rewrite event trigger is added concurrently with a command that could call such a trigger (Álvaro Herrera, Andrew Gierth, Tom Lane)

  • Avoid failure if a query-cancel or session-termination interrupt occurs while committing a prepared transaction (Stas Kelvich)

  • Fix query-lifespan memory leakage in repeatedly executed hash joins (Tom Lane)

  • 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”.

  • Fix overly strict sanity check in heap_prepare_freeze_tuple (Álvaro Herrera)

    This could result in incorrect “cannot freeze committed xmax” failures in databases that have been pg_upgrade'd from 9.2 or earlier.

  • Prevent dangling-pointer dereference when a C-coded before-update row trigger returns the “old” tuple (Rushabh Lathia)

  • Reduce locking during autovacuum worker scheduling (Jeff Janes)

    The previous behavior caused drastic loss of potential worker concurrency in databases with many tables.

  • Ensure client hostname is copied while copying pg_stat_activity data to local memory (Edmund Horner)

    Previously the supposedly-local snapshot contained a pointer into shared memory, allowing the client hostname column to change unexpectedly if any existing session disconnected.

  • 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.

  • Fix incorrect processing of multiple compound affixes in ispell dictionaries (Arthur Zakirov)

  • Fix collation-aware searches (that is, indexscans using inequality operators) in SP-GiST indexes on text columns (Tom Lane)

    Such searches would return the wrong set of rows in most non-C locales.

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

  • Count the number of index tuples correctly during initial build of an SP-GiST index (Tomas Vondra)

    Previously, the tuple count was reported to be the same as that of the underlying table, which is wrong if the index is partial.

  • Count the number of index tuples correctly during vacuuming of a GiST index (Andrey Borodin)

    Previously it reported the estimated number of heap tuples, which might be inaccurate, and is certainly wrong if the index is partial.

  • Fix a corner case where a streaming standby gets stuck at a WAL continuation record (Kyotaro Horiguchi)

  • In logical decoding, avoid possible double processing of WAL data when a walsender restarts (Craig Ringer)

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

  • Allow scalarltsel and scalargtsel to be used on non-core datatypes (Tomas Vondra)

  • Reduce libpq's memory consumption when a server error is reported after a large amount of query output has been collected (Tom Lane)

    Discard the previous output before, not after, processing the error message. On some platforms, notably Linux, this can make a difference in the application's subsequent memory footprint.

  • Fix double-free crashes in ecpg (Patrick Krecker, Jeevan Ladhe)

  • Fix ecpg to handle long long int variables correctly in MSVC builds (Michael Meskes, Andrew Gierth)

  • Fix mis-quoting of values for list-valued GUC variables in dumps (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)

    The local_preload_libraries, session_preload_libraries, shared_preload_libraries, and temp_tablespaces variables were not correctly quoted in pg_dump output. This would cause problems if settings for these variables appeared in CREATE FUNCTION ... SET or ALTER DATABASE/ROLE ... SET clauses.

  • Fix pg_recvlogical to not fail against pre-v10 PostgreSQL servers (Michael Paquier)

    A previous fix caused pg_recvlogical to issue a command regardless of server version, but it should only be issued to v10 and later servers.

  • Ensure that pg_rewind deletes files on the target server if they are deleted from the source server during the run (Takayuki Tsunakawa)

    Failure to do this could result in data inconsistency on the target, particularly if the file in question is a WAL segment.

  • Fix pg_rewind to handle tables in non-default tablespaces correctly (Takayuki Tsunakawa)

  • Fix overflow handling in PL/pgSQL integer FOR loops (Tom Lane)

    The previous coding failed to detect overflow of the loop variable on some non-gcc compilers, leading to an infinite loop.

  • Adjust PL/Python regression tests to pass under Python 3.7 (Peter Eisentraut)

  • Support testing PL/Python and related modules when building with Python 3 and MSVC (Andrew Dunstan)

  • 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.

  • Rename internal b64_encode and b64_decode functions to avoid conflict with Solaris 11.4 built-in functions (Rainer Orth)

  • Sync our copy of the timezone library with IANA tzcode release 2018e (Tom Lane)

    This fixes the zic timezone data compiler to cope with negative daylight-savings offsets. While the PostgreSQL project will not immediately ship such timezone data, zic might be used with timezone data obtained directly from IANA, so it seems prudent to update zic now.

  • Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2018d for DST law changes in Palestine and Antarctica (Casey Station), plus historical corrections for Portugal and its colonies, as well as Enderbury, Jamaica, Turks & Caicos Islands, and Uruguay.

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

  • Fix failure to reset libpq's state fully between connection attempts (Tom Lane)

    An unprivileged user of dblink or postgres_fdw could bypass the checks intended to prevent use of server-side credentials, such as a ~/.pgpass file owned by the operating-system user running the server. Servers allowing peer authentication on local connections are particularly vulnerable. Other attacks such as SQL injection into a postgres_fdw session are also possible. Attacking postgres_fdw in this way requires the ability to create a foreign server object with selected connection parameters, but any user with access to dblink could exploit the problem. In general, an attacker with the ability to select the connection parameters for a libpq-using application could cause mischief, though other plausible attack scenarios are harder to think of. Our thanks to Andrew Krasichkov for reporting this issue. (CVE-2018-10915)

  • Fix INSERT ... ON CONFLICT UPDATE through a view that isn't just SELECT * FROM ... (Dean Rasheed, Amit Langote)

    Erroneous expansion of an updatable view could lead to crashes or “attribute ... has the wrong type” errors, if the view's SELECT list doesn't match one-to-one with the underlying table's columns. Furthermore, this bug could be leveraged to allow updates of columns that an attacking user lacks UPDATE privilege for, if that user has INSERT and UPDATE privileges for some other column(s) of the table. Any user could also use it for disclosure of server memory. (CVE-2018-10925)

  • Ensure that updates to the relfrozenxid and relminmxid values for “nailed” system catalogs are processed in a timely fashion (Andres Freund)

    Overoptimistic caching rules could prevent these updates from being seen by other sessions, leading to spurious errors and/or data corruption. The problem was significantly worse for shared catalogs, such as pg_authid, because the stale cache data could persist into new sessions as well as existing ones.

  • Fix case where a freshly-promoted standby crashes before having completed its first post-recovery checkpoint (Michael Paquier, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Pavan Deolasee, Álvaro Herrera)

    This led to a situation where the server did not think it had reached a consistent database state during subsequent WAL replay, preventing restart.

  • Avoid emitting a bogus WAL record when recycling an all-zero btree page (Amit Kapila)

    This mistake has been seen to cause assertion failures, and potentially it could result in unnecessary query cancellations on hot standby servers.

  • During WAL replay, guard against corrupted record lengths exceeding 1GB (Michael Paquier)

    Treat such a case as corrupt data. Previously, the code would try to allocate space and get a hard error, making recovery impossible.

  • When ending recovery, delay writing the timeline history file as long as possible (Heikki Linnakangas)

    This avoids some situations where a failure during recovery cleanup (such as a problem with a two-phase state file) led to inconsistent timeline state on-disk.

  • Improve performance of WAL replay for transactions that drop many relations (Fujii Masao)

    This change reduces the number of times that shared buffers are scanned, so that it is of most benefit when that setting is large.

  • Improve performance of lock releasing in standby server WAL replay (Thomas Munro)

  • Make logical WAL senders report streaming state correctly (Simon Riggs, Sawada Masahiko)

    The code previously mis-detected whether or not it had caught up with the upstream server.

  • 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.

  • Fix bugs in snapshot handling during logical decoding, allowing wrong decoding results in rare cases (Arseny Sher, Álvaro Herrera)

  • 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.

  • Ensure a table's cached index list is correctly rebuilt after an index creation fails partway through (Peter Geoghegan)

    Previously, the failed index's OID could remain in the list, causing problems later in the same session.

  • Fix mishandling of empty uncompressed posting list pages in GIN indexes (Sivasubramanian Ramasubramanian, Alexander Korotkov)

    This could result in an assertion failure after pg_upgrade of a pre-9.4 GIN index (9.4 and later will not create such pages).

  • 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.

  • Ensure that VACUUM will respond to signals within btree page deletion loops (Andres Freund)

    Corrupted btree indexes could result in an infinite loop here, and that previously wasn't interruptible without forcing a crash.

  • 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 misoptimization of equivalence classes involving composite-type columns (Tom Lane)

    This resulted in failure to recognize that an index on a composite column could provide the sort order needed for a mergejoin on that column.

  • 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)

  • Fix SQL-standard FETCH FIRST syntax to allow parameters ($n), as the standard expects (Andrew Gierth)

  • 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)

  • Widen COPY FROM's current-line-number counter from 32 to 64 bits (David Rowley)

    This avoids two problems with input exceeding 4G lines: COPY FROM WITH HEADER would drop a line every 4G lines, not only the first line, and error reports could show a wrong line number.

  • 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.

  • Add a string freeing function to ecpg's pgtypes library, so that cross-module memory management problems can be avoided on Windows (Takayuki Tsunakawa)

    On Windows, crashes can ensue if the free call for a given chunk of memory is not made from the same DLL that malloc'ed the memory. The pgtypes library sometimes returns strings that it expects the caller to free, making it impossible to follow this rule. Add a PGTYPESchar_free() function that just wraps free, allowing applications to follow this rule.

  • Fix ecpg's support for long long variables on Windows, as well as other platforms that declare strtoll/strtoull nonstandardly or not at all (Dang Minh Huong, Tom Lane)

  • Fix misidentification of SQL statement type in PL/pgSQL, when a rule change causes a change in the semantics of a statement intra-session (Tom Lane)

    This error led to assertion failures, or in rare cases, failure to enforce the INTO STRICT option as expected.

  • Fix password prompting in client programs so that echo is properly disabled on Windows when stdin is not the terminal (Matthew Stickney)

  • Further fix mis-quoting of values for list-valued GUC variables in dumps (Tom Lane)

    The previous fix for quoting of search_path and other list-valued variables in pg_dump output turned out to misbehave for empty-string list elements, and it risked truncation of long file paths.

  • Fix pg_dump's failure to dump REPLICA IDENTITY properties for constraint indexes (Tom Lane)

    Manually created unique indexes were properly marked, but not those created by declaring UNIQUE or PRIMARY KEY constraints.

  • Make pg_upgrade check that the old server was shut down cleanly (Bruce Momjian)

    The previous check could be fooled by an immediate-mode shutdown.

  • Fix contrib/hstore_plperl to look through Perl scalar references, and to not crash if it doesn't find a hash reference where it expects one (Tom Lane)

  • Fix crash in contrib/ltree's lca() function when the input array is empty (Pierre Ducroquet)

  • Fix various error-handling code paths in which an incorrect error code might be reported (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane, Magnus Hagander)

  • Rearrange makefiles to ensure that programs link to freshly-built libraries (such as libpq.so) rather than ones that might exist in the system library directories (Tom Lane)

    This avoids problems when building on platforms that supply old copies of PostgreSQL libraries.

  • Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2018e for DST law changes in North Korea, plus historical corrections for Czechoslovakia.

    This update includes a redefinition of “daylight savings” in Ireland, as well as for some past years in Namibia and Czechoslovakia. In those jurisdictions, legally standard time is observed in summer, and daylight savings time in winter, so that the daylight savings offset is one hour behind standard time not one hour ahead. This does not affect either the actual UTC offset or the timezone abbreviations in use; the only known effect is that the is_dst column in the pg_timezone_names view will now be true in winter and false in summer in these cases.

• ⇑ 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 character-class checks to not fail on Windows for Unicode characters above U+FFFF (Tom Lane, Kenji Uno)

    This bug affected full-text-search operations, as well as contrib/ltree and contrib/pg_trgm.

  • Ensure that the server will process already-received NOTIFY and SIGTERM interrupts before waiting for client input (Jeff Janes, Tom Lane)

  • Fix memory leak in repeated SP-GiST index scans (Tom Lane)

    This is only known to amount to anything significant in cases where an exclusion constraint using SP-GiST receives many new index entries in a single command.

  • Prevent starting the server with wal_level set to too low a value to support an existing replication slot (Andres Freund)

  • Fix psql, as well as documentation examples, to call PQconsumeInput() before each PQnotifies() call (Tom Lane)

    This fixes cases in which psql would not report receipt of a NOTIFY message until after the next command.

  • 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.

  • Fix build problems on macOS 10.14 (Mojave) (Tom Lane)

    Adjust configure to add an -isysroot switch to CPPFLAGS; without this, PL/Perl and PL/Tcl fail to configure or build on macOS 10.14. The specific sysroot used can be overridden at configure time or build time by setting the PG_SYSROOT variable in the arguments of configure or make.

    It is now recommended that Perl-related extensions write $(perl_includespec) rather than -I$(perl_archlibexp)/CORE in their compiler flags. The latter continues to work on most platforms, but not recent macOS.

    Also, it should no longer be necessary to specify --with-tclconfig manually to get PL/Tcl to build on recent macOS releases.

  • Fix MSVC build and regression-test scripts to work on recent Perl versions (Andrew Dunstan)

    Perl no longer includes the current directory in its search path by default; work around that.

  • On Windows, allow the regression tests to be run by an Administrator account (Andrew Dunstan)

    To do this safely, pg_regress now gives up any such privileges at startup.

  • Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2018g for DST law changes in Chile, Fiji, Morocco, and Russia (Volgograd), plus historical corrections for China, Hawaii, Japan, Macau, and North Korea.

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

  • By default, panic instead of retrying after fsync() failure, to avoid possible data corruption (Craig Ringer, Thomas Munro)

    Some popular operating systems discard kernel data buffers when unable to write them out, reporting this as fsync() failure. If we reissue the fsync() request it will succeed, but in fact the data has been lost, so continuing risks database corruption. By raising a panic condition instead, we can replay from WAL, which may contain the only remaining copy of the data in such a situation. While this is surely ugly and inefficient, there are few alternatives, and fortunately the case happens very rarely.

    A new server parameter data_sync_retry has been added to control this; if you are certain that your kernel does not discard dirty data buffers in such scenarios, you can set data_sync_retry to on to restore the old behavior.

  • Include each major release branch's release notes in the documentation for only that branch, rather than that branch and all later ones (Tom Lane)

    The duplication induced by the previous policy was getting out of hand. Our plan is to provide a full archive of release notes on the project's web site, but not duplicate it within each release.

  • 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 possible deadlock when acquiring multiple buffer locks (Nishant Fnu)

  • 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.

  • Avoid deadlock between hot-standby queries and replay of GIN index page deletion (Alexander Korotkov)

  • Fix possible crashes in logical replication when index expressions or predicates are in use (Peter Eisentraut)

  • Avoid useless and expensive logical decoding of TOAST data during a table rewrite (Tomas Vondra)

  • Fix logic for stopping a subset of WAL senders when synchronous replication is enabled (Paul Guo, Michael Paquier)

  • Avoid possibly writing an incorrect replica identity field in a tuple deletion WAL record (Stas Kelvich)

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

  • Make the archiver prioritize WAL history files over WAL data files while choosing which file to archive next (David Steele)

  • Fix possible crash in UPDATE with a multiple SET clause using a sub-SELECT as source (Tom Lane)

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

  • Avoid crash if libxml2 returns a null error message (Sergio Conde Gómez)

  • 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 spurious grouping-related parser errors caused by inconsistent handling of collation assignment (Andrew Gierth)

    In some cases, expressions that should be considered to match were not seen as matching, if they included operations on collatable data types.

  • 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)

  • Check whether the comparison function underlying LEAST() or GREATEST() is leakproof, rather than just assuming it is (Tom Lane)

    Actual information leaks from btree comparison functions are typically hard to provoke, but in principle they could happen.

  • 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 incorrect planning of queries in which a lateral reference must be evaluated at a foreign table scan (Tom Lane)

  • 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)

  • Fix corner-case underestimation of the cost of a merge join (Tom Lane)

    The planner could prefer a merge join when the outer key range is much smaller than the inner key range, even if there are so many duplicate keys on the inner side that this is a poor choice.

  • Avoid O(N^2) planning time growth when a query contains many thousand indexable clauses (Tom Lane)

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

  • Improve ANALYZE's handling of concurrently-updated rows (Jeff Janes, Tom Lane)

    Previously, rows deleted by an in-progress transaction were omitted from ANALYZE's sample, but this has been found to lead to more inconsistency than including them would do. In effect, the sample now corresponds to an MVCC snapshot as of ANALYZE's start time.

  • Make TRUNCATE ignore inheritance child tables that are temporary tables of other sessions (Amit Langote, Michael Paquier)

    This brings TRUNCATE into line with the behavior of other commands. Previously, such cases usually ended in failure.

  • Fix TRUNCATE to update the statistics counters for the right table (Tom Lane)

    If the truncated table had a TOAST table, that table's counters were reset instead.

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

  • Allow UNLISTEN in hot-standby mode (Shay Rojansky)

    This is necessarily a no-op, because LISTEN isn't allowed in hot-standby mode; but allowing the dummy operation simplifies session-state-reset logic in clients.

  • Fix missing role dependencies in some schema and data type permissions lists (Tom Lane)

    In some cases it was possible to drop a role to which permissions had been granted. This caused no immediate problem, but a subsequent dump/reload or upgrade would fail, with symptoms involving attempts to grant privileges to all-numeric role names.

  • 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.

  • Ensure relation caches are updated properly after renaming constraints (Amit Langote)

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

  • Prevent empty GIN index pages from being reclaimed too quickly, causing failures of concurrent searches (Andrey Borodin, Alexander Korotkov)

  • Fix edge-case failures in float-to-integer coercions (Andrew Gierth, Tom Lane)

    Values very slightly above the maximum valid integer value might not be rejected, and then would overflow, producing the minimum valid integer instead. Also, values that should round to the minimum or maximum integer value might be incorrectly rejected.

  • 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.

  • Disallow setting client_min_messages higher than ERROR (Jonah Harris, Tom Lane)

    Previously, it was possible to set this variable to FATAL or PANIC, which had the effect of suppressing transmission of ordinary error messages to the client. However, that's contrary to guarantees that are given in the PostgreSQL wire protocol specification, and it caused some clients to become very confused. In released branches, fix this by silently treating such settings as meaning ERROR instead. Version 12 and later will reject those alternatives altogether.

  • Fix ecpglib to use uselocale() or _configthreadlocale() in preference to setlocale() (Michael Meskes, Tom Lane)

    Since setlocale() is not thread-local, and might not even be thread-safe, the previous coding caused problems in multi-threaded ecpg applications.

  • Fix incorrect results for numeric data passed through an ecpg SQLDA (SQL Descriptor Area) (Daisuke Higuchi)

    Values with leading zeroes were not copied correctly.

  • Fix psql's \g target meta-command to work with COPY TO STDOUT (Daniel Vérité)

    Previously, the target option was ignored, so that the copy data always went to the current query output target.

  • Make psql's LaTeX output formats render special characters properly (Tom Lane)

    Backslash and some other ASCII punctuation characters were not rendered correctly, leading to document syntax errors or wrong characters in the output.

  • 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)

  • Fix pg_dump's handling of materialized views with indirect dependencies on primary keys (Tom Lane)

    This led to mis-labeling of such views' dump archive entries, causing harmless warnings about “archive items not in correct section order”; less harmlessly, selective-restore options depending on those labels, such as --section, might misbehave.

  • 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.

  • Avoid null-pointer-dereference crash on some platforms when pg_dump or pg_restore tries to report an error (Tom Lane)

  • 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.

  • Fix contrib/hstore to calculate correct hash values for empty hstore values that were created in version 8.4 or before (Andrew Gierth)

    The previous coding did not give the same result as for an empty hstore value created by a newer version, thus potentially causing wrong results in hash joins or hash aggregation. It is advisable to reindex any hash indexes built on hstore columns, if the table might contain data that was originally stored as far back as 8.4 and was never dumped/reloaded since then.

  • Avoid crashes and excessive runtime with large inputs to contrib/intarray's gist__int_ops index support (Andrew Gierth)

  • 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)

  • Support new Makefile variables PG_CFLAGS, PG_CXXFLAGS, and PG_LDFLAGS in pgxs builds (Christoph Berg)

    This simplifies customization of extension build processes.

  • Fix Perl-coded build scripts to not assume “.” is in the search path, since recent Perl versions don't include that (Andrew Dunstan)

  • Fix server command-line option parsing problems on OpenBSD (Tom Lane)

  • 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.

  • Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2018i for DST law changes in Kazakhstan, Metlakatla, and Sao Tome and Principe. Kazakhstan's Qyzylorda zone is split in two, creating a new zone Asia/Qostanay, as some areas did not change UTC offset. Historical corrections for Hong Kong and numerous Pacific islands.

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

  • Prevent row-level security policies from being bypassed via selectivity estimators (Dean Rasheed)

    Some of the planner's selectivity estimators apply user-defined operators to values found in pg_statistic (e.g., most-common values). A leaky operator therefore can disclose some of the entries in a data column, even if the calling user lacks permission to read that column. In CVE-2017-7484 we added restrictions to forestall that, but we failed to consider the effects of row-level security. A user who has SQL permission to read a column, but who is forbidden to see certain rows due to RLS policy, might still learn something about those rows' contents via a leaky operator. This patch further tightens the rules, allowing leaky operators to be applied to statistics data only when there is no relevant RLS policy. (CVE-2019-10130)

  • 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).

  • Fix behavior for an UPDATE or DELETE on an inheritance tree or partitioned table in which every table can be excluded (Amit Langote, Tom Lane)

    In such cases, the query did not report the correct set of output columns when a RETURNING clause was present, and if there were any statement-level triggers that should be fired, it didn't fire them.

  • 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.

  • Fix handling of explicit DEFAULT items in an INSERT ... VALUES command with multiple VALUES rows, if the target relation is an updatable view (Amit Langote, Dean Rasheed)

    When the updatable view has no default for the column but its underlying table has one, a single-row INSERT ... VALUES will use the underlying table's default. In the multi-row case, however, NULL was always used. Correct it to act like the single-row case.

  • Fix CREATE VIEW to allow zero-column views (Ashutosh Sharma)

    We should allow this for consistency with allowing zero-column tables. Since a table can be converted to a view, zero-column views could be created even with the restriction in place, leading to dump/reload failures.

  • Add missing support for CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS ... AS EXECUTE ... (Andreas Karlsson)

    The combination of IF NOT EXISTS and EXECUTE should work, but the grammar omitted it.

  • Ensure that sub-SELECTs appearing in row-level-security policy expressions are executed with the correct user's permissions (Dean Rasheed)

    Previously, if the table having the RLS policy was accessed via a view, such checks might be executed as the user calling the view, not as the view owner as they should be.

  • Accept XML documents as valid values of type xml when xmloption is set to content, as required by SQL:2006 and later (Chapman Flack)

    Previously PostgreSQL followed the SQL:2003 definition, which doesn't allow this. But that creates a serious problem for dump/restore: there is no setting of xmloption that will accept all valid XML data. Hence, switch to the 2006 definition.

    pg_dump is also modified to emit SET xmloption = content while restoring data, ensuring that dump/restore works even if the prevailing setting is document.

  • Improve server's startup-time checks for whether a pre-existing shared memory segment is still in use (Noah Misch)

    The postmaster is now more likely to detect that there are still active processes from a previous postmaster incarnation, even if the postmaster.pid file has been removed.

  • 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 incompatibility of GIN-index WAL records (Alexander Korotkov)

    A fix applied in February's minor releases was not sufficiently careful about backwards compatibility, leading to problems if a standby server of that vintage reads GIN page-deletion WAL records generated by a primary server of a previous minor release.

  • 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)

  • Tolerate EINVAL and ENOSYS error results, where appropriate, for fsync and sync_file_range calls (Thomas Munro, James Sewell)

    The previous change to panic on file synchronization failures turns out to have been excessively paranoid for certain cases where a failure is predictable and essentially means “operation not supported”.

  • 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 “failed to build any N-way joins” planner failures with lateral references leading out of FULL outer joins (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.

  • Check the appropriate user's permissions when enforcing rules about letting a leaky operator see pg_statistic data (Dean Rasheed)

    When an underlying table is being accessed via a view, consider the privileges of the view owner while deciding whether leaky operators may be applied to the table's statistics data, rather than the privileges of the user making the query. This makes the planner's rules about what data is visible match up with the executor's, avoiding unnecessarily-poor plans.

  • 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)

  • Avoid O(N^2) performance issue when rolling back a transaction that created many tables (Tomas Vondra)

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

  • Fix race conditions in management of dynamic shared memory (Thomas Munro)

    These could lead to “dsa_area could not attach to segment” or “cannot unpin a segment that is not pinned” errors.

  • Fix race condition in which a hot-standby postmaster could fail to shut down after receiving a smart-shutdown request (Tom Lane)

  • Fix possible crash when pg_identify_object_as_address() is given invalid input (Álvaro Herrera)

  • 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.

  • Tighten validation of encoded SCRAM-SHA-256 and MD5 passwords (Jonathan Katz)

    A password string that had the right initial characters could be mistaken for one that is correctly hashed into SCRAM-SHA-256 or MD5 format. The password would be accepted but would be unusable later.

  • Fix handling of lc_time settings that imply an encoding different from the database's encoding (Juan José Santamaría Flecha, Tom Lane)

    Localized month or day names that include non-ASCII characters previously caused unexpected errors or wrong output in such locales.

  • 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 incorrect operator_precedence_warning checks involving unary minus operators (Rikard Falkeborn)

  • Disallow NaN as a value for floating-point server parameters (Tom Lane)

  • Rearrange REINDEX processing to avoid assertion failures when reindexing individual indexes of pg_class (Andres Freund, Tom Lane)

  • Fix planner assertion failure for parameterized dummy paths (Tom Lane)

  • Insert correct test function in the result of SnapBuildInitialSnapshot() (Antonin Houska)

    No core code cares about this, but some extensions do.

  • Fix intermittent “could not reattach to shared memory” session startup failures on Windows (Noah Misch)

    A previously unrecognized source of these failures is creation of thread stacks for a process's default thread pool. Arrange for such stacks to be allocated in a different memory region.

  • Fix error detection in directory scanning on Windows (Konstantin Knizhnik)

    Errors, such as lack of permissions to read the directory, were not detected or reported correctly; instead the code silently acted as though the directory were empty.

  • Fix grammar problems in ecpg (Tom Lane)

    A missing semicolon led to mistranslation of SET variable = DEFAULT (but not SET variable TO DEFAULT) in ecpg programs, producing syntactically invalid output that the server would reject. Additionally, in a DROP TYPE or DROP DOMAIN command that listed multiple type names, only the first type name was actually processed.

  • Sync ecpg's syntax for CREATE TABLE AS with the server's (Daisuke Higuchi)

  • Fix possible buffer overruns in ecpg's processing of include filenames (Liu Huailing, Fei Wu)

  • 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)

  • Avoid crash in contrib/vacuumlo if an lo_unlink() call failed (Tom Lane)

  • Sync our copy of the timezone library with IANA tzcode release 2019a (Tom Lane)

    This corrects a small bug in zic that caused it to output an incorrect year-2440 transition in the Africa/Casablanca zone, and adds support for zic's new -r option.

  • Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2019a for DST law changes in Palestine and Metlakatla, plus historical corrections for Israel.

    Etc/UCT is now a backward-compatibility link to Etc/UTC, instead of being a separate zone that generates the abbreviation UCT, which nowadays is typically a typo. PostgreSQL will still accept UCT as an input zone abbreviation, but it won't output it.

• ⇑ 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)

  • Fix failure of ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN TYPE when the table has a partial exclusion constraint (Tom Lane)

  • Fix failure of COMMENT command for comments on domain constraints (Daniel Gustafsson, Michael Paquier)

  • 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 incorrect printing of queries with duplicate join names (Philip Dubé)

    This oversight caused a dump/restore failure for views containing such queries.

  • 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.

  • Fix misoptimization of {1,1} quantifiers in regular expressions (Tom Lane)

    Such quantifiers were treated as no-ops and optimized away; but the documentation specifies that they impose greediness, or non-greediness in the case of the non-greedy variant {1,1}?, on the subexpression they're attached to, and this did not happen. The misbehavior occurred only if the subexpression contained capturing parentheses or a back-reference.

  • 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.

  • Avoid possible failures while initializing a new process's pg_stat_activity data (Tom Lane)

    Certain operations that could fail, such as converting strings extracted from an SSL certificate into the database encoding, were being performed inside a critical section. Failure there would result in database-wide lockup due to violating the access protocol for shared pg_stat_activity data.

  • Fix race condition in check to see whether a pre-existing shared memory segment is still in use by a conflicting postmaster (Tom Lane)

  • 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.

  • Avoid attempting to do database accesses for parameter checking in processes that are not connected to a specific database (Vignesh C, Andres Freund)

    This error could result in failures like “cannot read pg_class without having selected a database”.

  • Avoid possible hang in libpq if using SSL and OpenSSL's pending-data buffer contains an exact multiple of 256 bytes (David Binderman)

  • Improve initdb's handling of multiple equivalent names for the system time zone (Tom Lane, Andrew Gierth)

    Make initdb examine the /etc/localtime symbolic link, if that exists, to break ties between equivalent names for the system time zone. This makes initdb more likely to select the time zone name that the user would expect when multiple identical time zones exist. It will not change the behavior if /etc/localtime is not a symlink to a zone data file, nor if the time zone is determined from the TZ environment variable.

    Separately, prefer UTC over other spellings of that time zone, when neither TZ nor /etc/localtime provide a hint. This fixes an annoyance introduced by tzdata 2019a's change to make the UCT and UTC zone names equivalent: initdb was then preferring UCT, which almost nobody wants.

  • 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 misleading error reports from reindexdb (Julien Rouhaud)

  • Ensure that vacuumdb returns correct status if an error occurs while using parallel jobs (Julien Rouhaud)

  • 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.

  • In contrib/postgres_fdw, account for possible data modifications by local BEFORE ROW UPDATE triggers (Shohei Mochizuki)

    If a trigger modified a column that was otherwise not changed by the UPDATE, the new value was not transmitted to the remote server.

  • On Windows, avoid failure when the database encoding is set to SQL_ASCII and we attempt to log a non-ASCII string (Noah Misch)

    The code had been assuming that such strings must be in UTF-8, and would throw an error if they didn't appear to be validly encoded. Now, just transmit the untranslated bytes to the log.

  • Make PL/pgSQL's header files C++-safe (George Tarasov)

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11.5 released on 2019-08-08 - docs

  • Require schema qualification to cast to a temporary type when using functional cast syntax (Noah Misch)

    We have long required invocations of temporary functions to explicitly specify the temporary schema, that is pg_temp.func_name(args). Require this as well for casting to temporary types using functional notation, for example pg_temp.type_name(arg). Otherwise it's possible to capture a function call using a temporary object, allowing privilege escalation in much the same ways that we blocked in CVE-2007-2138. (CVE-2019-10208)

  • 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)

  • Fix failure of ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN TYPE when altering multiple columns' types in one command (Tom Lane)

    This fixes a regression introduced in the most recent minor releases: indexes using the altered columns were not processed correctly, leading to strange failures during ALTER TABLE.

  • 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.

  • Avoid using unnecessary sort steps for some queries with GROUPING SETS (Andrew Gierth, Richard Guo)

  • 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.

  • Fix mishandling of multi-column foreign keys when rebuilding a foreign key constraint (Tom Lane)

    ALTER TABLE could make an incorrect decision about whether revalidation of a foreign key is necessary, if not all columns of the key are of the same type. It seems likely that the error would always have been in the conservative direction, that is revalidating unnecessarily.

  • 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.

  • Prevent incorrect canonicalization of date ranges with infinity endpoints (Laurenz Albe)

    It's incorrect to try to convert an open range to a closed one or vice versa by incrementing or decrementing the endpoint value, if the endpoint is infinite; so leave the range alone in such cases.

  • Fix loss of fractional digits when converting very large money values to numeric (Tom Lane)

  • Fix printing of BTREE_META_CLEANUP WAL records (Michael Paquier)

  • Prevent assertion failures due to mishandling of version-2 btree metapages (Peter Geoghegan)

  • Fix spinlock assembly code for MIPS CPUs so that it works on MIPS r6 (YunQiang Su)

  • 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.

  • Make libpq ignore carriage return (\r) in connection service files (Tom Lane, Michael Paquier)

    In some corner cases, service files containing Windows-style newlines could be mis-parsed, resulting in connection failures.

  • 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 pg_dump to ensure that custom operator classes are dumped in the right order (Tom Lane)

    If a user-defined opclass is the subtype opclass of a user-defined range type, related objects were dumped in the wrong order, producing an unrestorable dump. (The underlying failure to handle opclass dependencies might manifest in other cases too, but this is the only known case.)

  • 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)

  • Fix contrib/passwordcheck to coexist with other users of check_password_hook (Michael Paquier)

  • Fix contrib/sepgsql tests to work under recent SELinux releases (Mike Palmiotto)

  • 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)

  • Reduce stderr output from pg_upgrade's test script (Tom Lane)

  • 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)

  • Support building Postgres with Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 (Haribabu Kommi)

  • In Visual Studio builds, honor WindowsSDKVersion environment variable, if that's set (Peifeng Qiu)

    This fixes build failures in some configurations.

  • Support OpenSSL 1.1.0 and newer in Visual Studio builds (Juan José Santamaría Flecha, Michael Paquier)

  • Allow make options to be passed down to gmake when non-GNU make is invoked at the top level (Thomas Munro)

  • Avoid choosing localtime or posixrules as TimeZone during initdb (Tom Lane)

    In some cases initdb would choose one of these artificial zone names over the “real” zone name. Prefer any other match to the C library's timezone behavior over these two.

  • Adjust pg_timezone_names view to show the Factory time zone if and only if it has a short abbreviation (Tom Lane)

    Historically, IANA set up this artificial zone with an “abbreviation” like Local time zone must be set--see zic manual page. Modern versions of the tzdb database show -00 instead, but some platforms alter the data to show one or another of the historical phrases. Show this zone only if it uses the modern abbreviation.

  • Sync our copy of the timezone library with IANA tzcode release 2019b (Tom Lane)

    This adds support for zic's new -b slim option to reduce the size of the installed zone files. We are not currently using that, but may enable it in future.

  • Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2019b for DST law changes in Brazil, plus historical corrections for Hong Kong, Italy, and Palestine.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11.6 released on 2019-11-14 - docs

  • Fix failure of ALTER TABLE SET with a custom relation option (Michael Paquier)

  • Disallow changing a multiply-inherited column's type if not all parent tables were changed (Tom Lane)

    Previously, this was allowed, whereupon queries on the now-out-of-sync parent would fail.

  • Avoid failure if the same target table is specified twice in an ANALYZE command inside a transaction block (Tom Lane)

  • Prevent VACUUM from trying to freeze an old multixact ID involving a still-running transaction (Nathan Bossart, Jeremy Schneider)

    This case would lead to VACUUM failing until the old transaction terminates.

  • 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.

  • Ensure that offset expressions in WINDOW clauses are processed when a query's expressions are manipulated (Andrew Gierth)

    This oversight could result in assorted failures when the offsets are nontrivial expressions. One example is that a function parameter reference in such an expression would fail if the function was inlined.

  • Fix handling of whole-row variables in WITH CHECK OPTION expressions and row-level-security policy expressions (Andres Freund)

    Previously, such usage might result in bogus errors about row type mismatches.

  • Avoid postmaster failure if a parallel query requests a background worker when no postmaster child process array slots remain free (Tom Lane)

  • Prevent possible double-free if a BEFORE UPDATE trigger returns the old tuple as-is, and it is not the last such trigger (Thomas Munro)

  • 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.

  • Provide a relevant error context line when an error occurs while setting GUC parameters during parallel worker startup (Thomas Munro)

  • In serializable mode, ensure that row-level predicate locks are acquired on the correct version of the row (Thomas Munro, Heikki Linnakangas)

    If the visible version of the row is HOT-updated, the lock might be taken on its now-dead predecessor, resulting in subtle failures to guarantee serialization.

  • Ensure that fsync() is applied only to files that are opened read/write (Andres Freund, Michael Paquier)

    Some code paths tried to do this after opening a file read-only, but on some platforms that causes “bad file descriptor” or similar errors.

  • Allow encoding conversion to succeed on longer strings than before (Álvaro Herrera, Tom Lane)

    Previously, there was a hard limit of 0.25GB on the input string, but now it will work as long as the converted output is not over 1GB.

  • 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)

  • Allow repalloc() to give back space when a large chunk is reduced in size (Tom Lane)

  • Ensure that temporary WAL and history files are removed at the end of archive recovery (Sawada Masahiko)

  • Avoid failure in archive recovery if recovery_min_apply_delay is enabled (Fujii Masao)

    recovery_min_apply_delay is not typically used in this configuration, but it should work.

  • 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.

  • Avoid unwanted delay during shutdown of a logical replication walsender (Craig Ringer, Álvaro Herrera)

  • Fix timeout handling in logical replication walreceiver processes (Julien Rouhaud)

    Erroneous logic prevented wal_receiver_timeout from working in logical replication deployments.

  • Correctly time-stamp replication messages for logical decoding (Jeff Janes)

    This oversight resulted, for example, in pg_stat_subscription.last_msg_send_time usually reading as NULL.

  • In logical decoding, ensure that sub-transactions are correctly accounted for when reconstructing a snapshot (Masahiko Sawada)

    This error leads to assertion failures; it's unclear whether any bad effects exist in production builds.

  • Fix race condition during backend exit, when the backend process has previously waited for synchronous replication to occur (Dongming Liu)

  • Fix ALTER SYSTEM to cope with duplicate entries in postgresql.auto.conf (Ian Barwick)

    ALTER SYSTEM itself will not generate such a state, but external tools that modify postgresql.auto.conf could do so. Duplicate entries for the target variable will now be removed, and then the new setting (if any) will be appended at the end.

  • Reject include directives with empty file names in configuration files, and report include-file recursion more clearly (Ian Barwick, Tom Lane)

  • Avoid logging complaints about abandoned connections when using PAM authentication (Tom Lane)

    libpq-based clients will typically make two connection attempts when a password is required, since they don't prompt their user for a password until their first connection attempt fails. Therefore the server is coded not to generate useless log spam when a client closes the connection upon being asked for a password. However, the PAM authentication code hadn't gotten that memo, and would generate several messages about a phantom authentication failure.

  • Fix some cases where an incomplete date specification is not detected in time with time zone input (Alexander Lakhin)

    If a time zone with a time-varying UTC offset is specified, then a date must be as well, so that the offset can be resolved. Depending on the syntax used, this check was not enforced in some cases, allowing bogus output to be produced.

  • Fix misbehavior of bitshiftright() (Tom Lane)

    The bitstring right shift operator failed to zero out padding space that exists in the last byte of the result when the bitstring length is not a multiple of 8. While invisible to most operations, any nonzero bits there would result in unexpected comparison behavior, since bitstring comparisons don't bother to ignore the extra bits, expecting them to always be zero.

    If you have inconsistent data as a result of saving the output of bitshiftright() in a table, it's possible to fix it with something like

    UPDATE mytab SET bitcol = ~(~bitcol) WHERE bitcol != ~(~bitcol);
    

  • 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 detection of edge-case integer overflow in interval multiplication (Yuya Watari)

  • 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)

  • Fix incorrect compression logic for GIN posting lists (Heikki Linnakangas)

    A GIN posting list item can require 7 bytes if the distance between adjacent indexed TIDs exceeds 16TB. One step in the logic was out of sync with that, and might try to write the value into a 6-byte buffer. In principle this could cause a stack overrun, but on most architectures it's likely that the next byte would be unused alignment padding, making the bug harmless. In any case the bug would be very difficult to hit.

  • Fix handling of infinity, NaN, and NULL values in KNN-GiST (Alexander Korotkov)

    The query's output order could be wrong (different from a plain sort's result) if some distances computed for non-null column values are infinity or NaN.

  • Fix handling of searches for NULL in KNN-SP-GiST (Nikita Glukhov)

  • On Windows, recognize additional spellings of the “Norwegian (Bokmål)” locale name (Tom Lane)

  • Avoid compile failure if an ECPG client includes ecpglib.h while having ENABLE_NLS defined (Tom Lane)

    This risk was created by a misplaced declaration: ecpg_gettext() should not be visible to client code.

  • In psql, resynchronize internal state about the server after an unexpected connection loss and successful reconnection (Peter Billen, Tom Lane)

    Ordinarily this is unnecessary since the state would be the same anyway. But it can matter in corner cases, such as where the connection might lead to one of several servers. This change causes psql to re-issue any interactive messages that it would have issued at startup, for example about whether SSL is in use.

  • Avoid platform-specific null pointer dereference in psql (Quentin Rameau)

  • In pg_dump, ensure stable output order for similarly-named triggers and row-level-security policy objects (Benjie Gillam)

    Previously, if two triggers on different tables had the same names, they would be sorted in OID-based order, which is less desirable than sorting them by table name. Likewise for RLS policies.

  • Fix pg_dump to work again with pre-8.3 source servers (Tom Lane)

    A previous fix caused pg_dump to always try to query pg_opfamily, but that catalog doesn't exist before version 8.3.

  • In pg_restore, treat -f - as meaning “output to stdout” (Álvaro Herrera)

    This synchronizes pg_restore's behavior with some other applications, and in particular makes pre-v12 branches act similarly to version 12's pg_restore, simplifying creation of dump/restore scripts that work across multiple PostgreSQL versions. Before this change, pg_restore interpreted such a switch as meaning “output to a file named -”, but few people would want that.

  • Improve pg_upgrade's checks for the use of a data type that has changed representation, such as line (Tomas Vondra)

    The previous coding could be fooled by cases where the data type of interest underlies a stored column of a domain or composite type.

  • Detect file read errors during pg_basebackup (Jeevan Chalke)

  • 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.

  • In pg_rewind with an online source cluster, disable timeouts, much as pg_dump does (Alexander Kukushkin)

  • Fix failure in pg_waldump with the -s option, when a continuation WAL record ends exactly at a page boundary (Andrey Lepikhov)

  • In pg_waldump, include the newitemoff field in btree page split records (Peter Geoghegan)

  • In pg_waldump with the --bkp-details option, avoid emitting extra newlines for WAL records involving full-page writes (Andres Freund)

  • Fix small memory leak in pg_waldump (Andres Freund)

  • Fix vacuumdb with a high --jobs option to handle running out of file descriptors better (Michael Paquier)

  • 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.

  • Fix contrib/intarray's GiST opclasses to not fail for empty arrays with <@ (Tom Lane)

    A clause like array_column <@ constant_array is considered indexable, but the index search may not find empty array values; of course, such entries should trivially match the search.

    The only practical back-patchable fix for this requires making <@ index searches scan the whole index, which is what this patch does. This is unfortunate: it means that the query performance is likely worse than a plain sequential scan would be.

    Applications whose performance is adversely impacted by this change have a couple of options. They could switch to a GIN index, which doesn't have this bug, or they could replace array_column <@ constant_array with array_column <@ constant_array AND array_column && constant_array. That will provide about the same performance as before, and it will find all non-empty subsets of the given constant array, which is all that could reliably be expected of the query before.

  • Fix configure's test for presence of libperl so that it works on recent Red Hat releases (Tom Lane)

    Previously, it could fail if the user sets CFLAGS to -O0.

  • Ensure correct code generation for spinlocks on PowerPC (Noah Misch)

    The previous spinlock coding allowed the compiler to select register zero for use with an assembly instruction that does not accept that register, causing a build failure. We have seen only one long-ago report that matches this bug, but it could cause problems for people trying to build modified PostgreSQL code or use atypical compiler options.

  • On PowerPC, avoid depending on the xlc compiler's __fetch_and_add() function (Noah Misch)

    xlc 13 and newer interpret this function in a way incompatible with our usage, resulting in an unusable build of PostgreSQL. Fix by using custom assembly code instead.

  • On AIX, don't use the compiler option -qsrcmsg (Noah Misch)

    This avoids an internal compiler error with xlc v16.1.0, with little consequence other than changing the format of compiler error messages.

  • Fix MSVC build process to cope with spaces in the file path of OpenSSL (Andrew Dunstan)

  • Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2019c for DST law changes in Fiji and Norfolk Island, plus historical corrections for Alberta, Austria, Belgium, British Columbia, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indiana (Perry County), Kaliningrad, Kentucky, Michigan, Norfolk Island, South Korea, and Turkey.

• ⇑ 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)

  • Avoid failure in logical decoding when a large transaction must be spilled into many separate temporary files (Amit Khandekar)

  • 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)

  • Fix failure in logical replication publisher after a database crash and restart (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.

  • Avoid memory leak when there are no free dynamic shared memory slots (Thomas Munro)

  • Ignore the CONCURRENTLY option when performing an index creation, drop, or rebuild on a temporary table (Michael Paquier, Heikki Linnakangas, Andres Freund)

    This avoids strange failures if the temporary table has an ON COMMIT action. There is no benefit in using CONCURRENTLY for a temporary table anyway, since other sessions cannot access the table, making the extra processing pointless.

  • Fix possible failure when resetting expression indexes on temporary tables that are marked ON COMMIT DELETE ROWS (Tom Lane)

  • Fix possible crash in BRIN index operations with box, range and inet data types (Heikki Linnakangas)

  • Fix handling of deleted pages in GIN indexes (Alexander Korotkov)

    Avoid possible deadlocks, incorrect updates of a deleted page's state, and failure to traverse through a recently-deleted page.

  • Fix possible crash with a SubPlan (sub-SELECT) within a multi-row VALUES list (Tom Lane)

  • 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.

  • Fix unlikely crash with pass-by-reference aggregate transition states (Andres Freund, Teodor Sigaev)

  • Improve error reporting in to_date() and to_timestamp() (Tom Lane, Álvaro Herrera)

    Reports about incorrect month or day names in input strings could truncate the input in the middle of a multi-byte character, leading to an improperly encoded error message that could cause follow-on failures. Truncate at the next whitespace instead.

  • Fix off-by-one result for EXTRACT(ISOYEAR FROM timestamp) for BC dates (Tom Lane)

  • Avoid stack overflow in information_schema views when a self-referential view exists in the system catalogs (Tom Lane)

    A self-referential view can't work; it will always result in infinite recursion. We handled that situation correctly when trying to execute the view, but not when inquiring whether it is automatically updatable.

  • 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.

  • Improve performance of hash joins with very large inner relations (Thomas Munro)

  • 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.

  • Fix edge-case crashes and misestimations in selectivity calculations for the <@ and @> range operators (Michael Paquier, Andrey Borodin, Tom Lane)

  • 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.

  • Improve error reporting for attempts to use automatic updating of views with conditional INSTEAD rules (Dean Rasheed)

    This has never been supported, but previously the error was thrown only at execution time, so that it could be masked by planner errors.

  • Prevent a composite type from being included in itself indirectly via a range type (Tom Lane, Julien Rouhaud)

  • Disallow partition key expressions that return pseudo-types, such as record (Tom Lane)

  • Fix error reporting for index expressions of prohibited types (Amit Langote)

  • Fix dumping of views that contain only a VALUES list to handle cases where a view output column has been renamed (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.

  • Allow libpq to parse all GSS-related connection parameters even when the GSSAPI code hasn't been compiled in (Tom Lane)

    This makes the behavior similar to our SSL support, where it was long ago deemed to be a good idea to always accept all the related parameters, even if some are ignored or restricted due to lack of the feature in a particular build.

  • Fix incorrect handling of %b and %B format codes in ecpg's PGTYPEStimestamp_fmt_asc() function (Tomas Vondra)

    Due to an off-by-one error, these codes would print the wrong month name, or possibly crash.

  • Fix parallel pg_dump/pg_restore to more gracefully handle failure to create worker processes (Tom Lane)

  • Prevent possible crash or lockup when attempting to terminate a parallel pg_dump/pg_restore run via a signal (Tom Lane)

  • In pg_upgrade, look inside arrays and ranges while searching for non-upgradable data types in tables (Tom Lane)

  • Apply more thorough syntax checking to createuser's --connection-limit option (Álvaro Herrera)

  • 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)

  • In contrib/dict_int, reject maxlen settings less than one (Tomas Vondra)

    This prevents a possible crash with silly settings for that parameter.

  • Disallow NULL category values in contrib/tablefunc's crosstab() function (Joe Conway)

    This case never worked usefully, and it would crash on some platforms.

  • 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.

  • Mark some timeout and statistics-tracking GUC variables as PGDLLIMPORT, to allow extensions to access them on Windows (Pascal Legrand)

    This applies to idle_in_transaction_session_timeout, lock_timeout, statement_timeout, track_activities, track_counts, and track_functions.

  • 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.

  • Fix race condition that led to delayed delivery of interprocess signals on Windows (Amit Kapila)

    This caused visible timing oddities in NOTIFY, and perhaps other misbehavior.

  • On Windows, retry a few times after an ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED file access failure (Alexander Lakhin, Tom Lane)

    This helps cope with cases where a file open attempt fails because the targeted file is flagged for deletion but not yet actually gone. pg_ctl, for example, frequently failed with such an error when probing to see if the postmaster had shut down yet.

• ⇑ Upgrade to 11.8 released on 2020-05-14 - docs

  • Propagate ALTER TABLE ... SET STORAGE to indexes (Peter Eisentraut)

    Non-expression index columns have always copied the attstorage property of their table column at creation. Update them when ALTER TABLE ... SET STORAGE is done, to maintain consistency.

  • Preserve the indisclustered setting of indexes rewritten by ALTER TABLE (Amit Langote, Justin Pryzby)

    Previously, ALTER TABLE lost track of which index had been used for CLUSTER.

  • Preserve the replica identity properties of indexes rewritten by ALTER TABLE (Quan Zongliang, Peter Eisentraut)

  • Lock objects sooner during DROP OWNED BY (Álvaro Herrera)

    This avoids failures in race-condition cases where another session is deleting some of the same objects.

  • Fix error-case processing for CREATE ROLE ... IN ROLE (Andrew Gierth)

    Some error cases would be reported as “unexpected node type” or the like, instead of the intended message.

  • Ensure that when a partition is detached, any triggers cloned from its formerly-parent table are removed (Justin Pryzby)

  • Ensure that unique indexes over partitioned tables match the equality semantics of the partitioning key (Guancheng Luo)

    This would only be an issue with index opclasses that have unusual notions of equality, but it's wrong in theory, so check.

  • Ensure that members of the pg_read_all_stats role can read all statistics views, as expected (Magnus Hagander)

    The functions underlying the pg_stat_progress_* views had not gotten this memo.

  • Repair performance regression in information_schema.triggers view (Tom Lane)

    This patch redefines that view so that an outer WHERE clause constraining the table name can be pushed down into the view, allowing its calculations to be done only for triggers belonging to the table of interest rather than all triggers in the database. In a database with many triggers this would make a significant speed difference for queries of that form. Since things worked that way before v11, this is a potential performance regression. Users who find this to be a problem can fix it by replacing the view definition (or, perhaps, just deleting and reinstalling the whole information_schema schema).

  • Fix full text search to handle NOT above a phrase search correctly (Tom Lane)

    Queries such as !(foo<->bar) failed to find matching rows when implemented as a GiST or GIN index search.

  • Fix full text search for cases where a phrase search includes an item with both prefix matching and a weight restriction (Tom Lane)

  • Fix ts_headline() to make better headline selections when working with phrase queries (Tom Lane)

  • Fix bugs in gin_fuzzy_search_limit processing (Adé Heyward, Tom Lane)

    A small value of gin_fuzzy_search_limit could result in unexpected slowness due to unintentionally rescanning the same index page many times. Another code path failed to apply the intended filtering at all, possibly returning too many values.

  • Allow input of type circle to accept the format “(x,y),r” as the documentation says it does (David Zhang)

  • Make the get_bit() and set_bit() functions cope with bytea strings longer than 256MB (Movead Li)

    Since the bit number argument is only int4, it's impossible to use these functions to access bits beyond the first 256MB of a long bytea. We'll widen the argument to int8 in v13, but in the meantime, allow these functions to work on the initial substring of a long bytea.

  • Ignore file-not-found errors in pg_ls_waldir() and allied functions (Tom Lane)

    This prevents a race condition failure if a file is removed between when we see its directory entry and when we attempt to stat() it.

  • Avoid possibly leaking an open-file descriptor for a directory in pg_ls_dir(), pg_timezone_names(), pg_tablespace_databases(), and allied functions (Justin Pryzby)

  • Fix polymorphic-function type resolution to correctly infer the actual type of an anyarray output when given only an anyrange input (Tom Lane)

  • Avoid leakage of a hashed subplan's hash tables across multiple executions (Andreas Karlsson, Tom Lane)

    This mistake could result in severe memory bloat if a query re-executed a hashed subplan enough times.

  • Avoid unlikely crash when REINDEX is terminated by a session-shutdown signal (Tom Lane)

  • Fix low-probability crash after constraint violation errors in partitioned tables (Andres Freund)

  • Prevent printout of possibly-incorrect hash join table statistics in EXPLAIN (Konstantin Knizhnik, Tom Lane, Thomas Munro)

  • Fix reporting of elapsed time for heap truncation steps in VACUUM VERBOSE (Tatsuhito Kasahara)

  • Fix possible undercounting of deleted B-tree index pages in VACUUM VERBOSE output (Peter Geoghegan)

  • Fix wrong bookkeeping for oldest deleted page in a B-tree index (Peter Geoghegan)

    This could cause subtly wrong decisions about when VACUUM can skip an index cleanup scan; although it appears there may be no significant user-visible effects from that.

  • Ensure that TimelineHistoryRead and TimelineHistoryWrite wait states are reported in all code paths that read or write timeline history files (Masahiro Ikeda)

  • Avoid possibly showing “waiting” twice in a process's PS status (Masahiko Sawada)

  • Avoid failure if autovacuum tries to access a just-dropped temporary schema (Tom Lane)

    This hazard only arises if a superuser manually drops a temporary schema; which isn't normal practice, but should work.

  • Avoid premature recycling of WAL segments during crash recovery (Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais)

    WAL segments that become ready to be archived during crash recovery were potentially recycled without being archived.

  • Avoid scanning irrelevant timelines during archive recovery (Kyotaro Horiguchi)

    This can eliminate many attempts to fetch non-existent WAL files from archive storage, which is helpful if archive access is slow.

  • Remove bogus “subtransaction logged without previous top-level txn record” error check in logical decoding (Arseny Sher, Amit Kapila)

    This condition is legitimately reachable in various scenarios, so remove the check.

  • Ensure that a replication slot's io_in_progress_lock is released in failure code paths (Pavan Deolasee)

    This could result in a walsender later becoming stuck waiting for the lock.

  • Fix race conditions in synchronous standby management (Tom Lane)

    During a change in the synchronous_standby_names setting, there was a window in which wrong decisions could be made about whether it is OK to release transactions that are waiting for synchronous commit. Another hazard for similarly wrong decisions existed if a walsender process exited and was immediately replaced by another.

  • Ensure nextXid can't go backwards on a standby server (Eka Palamadai)

    This race condition could allow incorrect hot standby feedback messages to be sent back to the primary server, potentially allowing VACUUM to run too soon on the primary.

  • Add missing SQLSTATE values to a few error reports (Sawada Masahiko)

  • Fix PL/pgSQL to reliably refuse to execute an event trigger function as a plain function (Tom Lane)

  • Fix memory leak in libpq when using sslmode=verify-full (Roman Peshkurov)

    Certificate verification during connection startup could leak some memory. This would become an issue if a client process opened many database connections during its lifetime.

  • Fix ecpg to treat an argument of just “-” as meaning “read from stdin” on all platforms (Tom Lane)

  • Allow tab-completion of the filename argument to psql's \gx command (Vik Fearing)

  • Add pg_dump support for ALTER ... DEPENDS ON EXTENSION (Álvaro Herrera)

    pg_dump previously ignored dependencies added this way, causing them to be forgotten during dump/restore or pg_upgrade.

  • Fix pg_dump to dump comments on RLS policy objects (Tom Lane)

  • In pg_dump, postpone restore of event triggers till the end (Fabrízio de Royes Mello, Hamid Akhtar, Tom Lane)

    This minimizes the risk that an event trigger could interfere with the restoration of other objects.

  • Make pg_verify_checksums skip tablespace subdirectories that belong to a different PostgreSQL major version (Michael Banck, Bernd Helmle)

    Such subdirectories don't really belong to our database cluster, and so must not be processed.

  • Ignore temporary copies of pg_internal.init in pg_verify_checksums and related programs (Michael Paquier)

  • Fix quoting of --encoding, --lc-ctype and --lc-collate values in createdb utility (Michael Paquier)

  • contrib/lo's lo_manage() function crashed if called directly rather than as a trigger (Tom Lane)

  • In contrib/ltree, protect against overflow of ltree and lquery length fields (Nikita Glukhov)

  • Work around failure in contrib/pageinspect's bt_metap() function when an oldest_xact value exceeds 2^31-1 (Peter Geoghegan)

    Such XIDs will now be reported as negative integers, which isn't great but it beats throwing an error. v13 will widen the output argument to int8 to provide saner reporting.

  • Fix cache reference leak in contrib/sepgsql (Michael Luo)

  • Avoid failures when dealing with Unix-style locale names on Windows (Juan José Santamaría Flecha)

  • Use pkg-config, if available, to locate libxml2 during configure (Hugh McMaster, Tom Lane, Peter Eisentraut)

    If pkg-config is not present or lacks knowledge of libxml2, we still query xml2-config as before.

    This change could break build processes that try to make PostgreSQL use a non-default version of libxml2 by putting that version's xml2-config into the PATH. Instead, set XML2_CONFIG to point to the non-default xml2-config. That method will work with either older or newer PostgreSQL releases.

  • In MSVC builds, cope with spaces in the path name for Python (Victor Wagner)

  • In MSVC builds, fix detection of Visual Studio version to work with more language settings (Andrew Dunstan)

  • In MSVC builds, use -Wno-deprecated with bison versions newer than 3.0, as non-Windows builds already do (Andrew Dunstan)

  • Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2020a for DST law changes in Morocco and the Canadian Yukon, plus historical corrections for Shanghai.

    The America/Godthab zone has been renamed to America/Nuuk to reflect current English usage; however, the old name remains available as a compatibility link.

    Also, update initdb's list of known Windows time zone names to include recent additions, improving the odds that it will correctly translate the system time zone setting on that platform.

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