As usual, the release notes for older branches will be made by cutting
these down, but put them up for community review first.
Note: a significant fraction of these items don't apply to 9.4.1, only to
older branches, because the fixes already appeared in 9.4.0. These can be
distinguished by noting the branch commits in the associated SGML comments.
This will be adjusted tomorrow while copying items into the older
release-X.Y.sgml files. In a few cases I've made two separate entries with
different wordings for 9.4 than for the equivalent commits in the older
branches.
We've been trying to support \u0000 in JSON values since commit
78ed8e03c6, and have introduced increasingly worse hacks to try to
make it work, such as commit 0ad1a81632. However, it fundamentally
can't work in the way envisioned, because the stored representation looks
the same as for \\u0000 which is not the same thing at all. It's also
entirely bogus to output \u0000 when de-escaped output is called for.
The right way to do this would be to store an actual 0x00 byte, and then
throw error only if asked to produce de-escaped textual output. However,
getting to that point seems likely to take considerable work and may well
never be practical in the 9.4.x series.
To preserve our options for better behavior while getting rid of the nasty
side-effects of 0ad1a81632, revert that commit in toto and instead
throw error if \u0000 is used in a context where it needs to be de-escaped.
(These are the same contexts where non-ASCII Unicode escapes throw error
if the database encoding isn't UTF8, so this behavior is by no means
without precedent.)
In passing, make both the \u0000 case and the non-ASCII Unicode case report
ERRCODE_UNTRANSLATABLE_CHARACTER / "unsupported Unicode escape sequence"
rather than claiming there's something wrong with the input syntax.
Back-patch to 9.4, where we have to do something because 0ad1a81632
broke things for many cases having nothing to do with \u0000. 9.3 also has
bogus behavior, but only for that specific escape value, so given the lack
of field complaints it seems better to leave 9.3 alone.
This is advance preparation for introducing even more test modules; the
easy solution is to add them to contrib, but that's bloated enough that
it seems a good time to think of something different.
Moved modules are dummy_seclabel, test_shm_mq, test_parser and
worker_spi.
(test_decoding was also a candidate, but there was too much opposition
to moving that one. We can always reconsider later.)
Add entries for recent changes, including noting the JSONB format change
and the recent timezone data changes. We should remove those two items
before 9.4 final: the JSONB change will be of no interest in the long
run, and it's not normally our habit to mention timezone updates in
major-release notes. But it seems important to document them temporarily
for beta testers.
I failed to resist the temptation to wordsmith a couple of existing
entries, too.
Errors detected using Topy (https://github.com/intgr/topy), all
changes verified by hand and some manual tweaks added.
Marti Raudsepp
Individual changes backpatched, where applicable, as far as 9.0.
Cause the path extraction operators to return their lefthand input,
not NULL, if the path array has no elements. This seems more consistent
since the case ought to correspond to applying the simple extraction
operator (->) zero times.
Cause other corner cases in field/element/path extraction to return NULL
rather than failing. This behavior is arguably more useful than throwing
an error, since it allows an expression index using these operators to be
built even when not all values in the column are suitable for the
extraction being indexed. Moreover, we already had multiple
inconsistencies between the path extraction operators and the simple
extraction operators, as well as inconsistencies between the JSON and
JSONB code paths. Adopt a uniform rule of returning NULL rather than
throwing an error when the JSON input does not have a structure that
permits the request to be satisfied.
Back-patch to 9.4. Update the release notes to list this as a behavior
change since 9.3.
As 'ALTER TABLESPACE .. MOVE ALL' really didn't change the tablespace
but instead changed objects inside tablespaces, it made sense to
rework the syntax and supporting functions to operate under the
'ALTER (TABLE|INDEX|MATERIALIZED VIEW)' syntax and to be in
tablecmds.c.
Pointed out by Alvaro, who also suggested the new syntax.
Back-patch to 9.4.
Oversight in commit 7cbe57c34d.
Back-patch to 9.4, where that commit first appeared. In passing,
release-note the FDW API postcondition change from the same commit.
Commit f30015b6d7 made this happen for
timestamp and timestamptz, but it seems pretty inconsistent to not
do it for simple dates as well.
(In passing, I re-pgindent'd json.c.)
Update the notes to include commits through today, and do a lot of
wordsmithing and markup adjustment. Notably, don't use <link> where <xref>
will do; since we got rid of the text-format HISTORY file, there is no
longer a reason to avoid <xref>.
Previously, any backslash in text being escaped for JSON was doubled so
that the result was still valid JSON. However, this led to some perverse
results in the case of Unicode sequences, These are now detected and the
initial backslash is no longer escaped. All other backslashes are
still escaped. No validity check is performed, all that is looked for is
\uXXXX where X is a hexidecimal digit.
This is a change from the 9.2 and 9.3 behaviour as noted in the Release
notes.
Per complaint from Teodor Sigaev.
Many JSON processors require timestamp strings in ISO 8601 format in
order to convert the strings. When converting a timestamp, with or
without timezone, to a JSON datum we therefore now use such a format
rather than the type's default text output, in functions such as
to_json().
This is a change in behaviour from 9.2 and 9.3, as noted in the release
notes.
Per discussion, this seems like a more consistent choice of name.
Fabrízio de Royes Mello, after a suggestion by Peter Eisentraut;
some additional documentation wordsmithing by me
Per discussion, the old value of 128MB is ridiculously small on modern
machines; in fact, it's not even any larger than the default value of
shared_buffers, which it certainly should be. Increase to 4GB, which
is unlikely to be any worse than the old default for anyone, and should
be noticeably better for most. Eventually we might have an autotuning
scheme for this setting, but the recent attempt crashed and burned,
so for now just do this.