Release 8.3.11Release date2010-05-17
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.10.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.11
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.8,
see the release notes for 8.3.8.
Changes
Fix possible crash if a cache reset message is received during
rebuild of a relcache entry (Heikki)
This error was introduced in 8.3.10 while fixing a related failure.
Apply per-function GUC settings while running the language validator
for the function (Itagaki Takahiro)
This avoids failures if the function's code is invalid without the
setting; an example is that SQL functions may not parse if the
search_path> is not correct.
Do not allow an unprivileged user to reset superuser-only parameter
settings (Alvaro)
Previously, if an unprivileged user ran ALTER USER ... RESET
ALL> for himself, or ALTER DATABASE ... RESET ALL> for
a database he owns, this would remove all special parameter settings
for the user or database, even ones that are only supposed to be
changeable by a superuser. Now, the ALTER> will only
remove the parameters that the user has permission to change.
Avoid possible crash during backend shutdown if shutdown occurs
when a CONTEXT> addition would be made to log entries (Tom)
In some cases the context-printing function would fail because the
current transaction had already been rolled back when it came time
to print a log message.
Ensure the archiver process responds to changes in
archive_command> as soon as possible (Tom)
Update pl/perl's ppport.h> for modern Perl versions
(Andrew)
Fix assorted memory leaks in pl/python (Andreas Freund, Tom)
Prevent infinite recursion in psql> when expanding
a variable that refers to itself (Tom)
Fix psql>'s \copy> to not add spaces around
a dot within \copy (select ...)> (Tom)
Addition of spaces around the decimal point in a numeric literal would
result in a syntax error.
Fix unnecessary GIN indexes do not support whole-index scans>
errors for unsatisfiable queries using contrib/intarray>
operators (Tom)
Ensure that contrib/pgstattuple> functions respond to cancel
interrupts promptly (Tatsuhito Kasahara)
Make server startup deal properly with the case that
shmget()> returns EINVAL> for an existing
shared memory segment (Tom)
This behavior has been observed on BSD-derived kernels including OS X.
It resulted in an entirely-misleading startup failure complaining that
the shared memory request size was too large.
Avoid possible crashes in syslogger process on Windows (Heikki)
Deal more robustly with incomplete time zone information in the
Windows registry (Magnus)
Update the set of known Windows time zone names (Magnus)
Update time zone data files to tzdata> release 2010j
for DST law changes in Argentina, Australian Antarctic, Bangladesh,
Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Russia, Syria, Tunisia;
also historical corrections for Taiwan.
Also, add PKST> (Pakistan Summer Time) to the default set of
timezone abbreviations.
Release 8.3.10Release date2010-03-15
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.9.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.10
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.8,
see the release notes for 8.3.8.
Changes
Add new configuration parameter ssl_renegotiation_limit> to
control how often we do session key renegotiation for an SSL connection
(Magnus)
This can be set to zero to disable renegotiation completely, which may
be required if a broken SSL library is used. In particular, some
vendors are shipping stopgap patches for CVE-2009-3555 that cause
renegotiation attempts to fail.
Fix possible deadlock during backend startup (Tom)
Fix possible crashes due to not handling errors during relcache reload
cleanly (Tom)
Fix possible crash due to use of dangling pointer to a cached plan
(Tatsuo)
Fix possible crashes when trying to recover from a failure in
subtransaction start (Tom)
Fix server memory leak associated with use of savepoints and a client
encoding different from server's encoding (Tom)
Fix incorrect WAL data emitted during end-of-recovery cleanup of a GIST
index page split (Yoichi Hirai)
This would result in index corruption, or even more likely an error
during WAL replay, if we were unlucky enough to crash during
end-of-recovery cleanup after having completed an incomplete GIST
insertion.
Make substring()> for bit> types treat any negative
length as meaning all the rest of the string> (Tom)
The previous coding treated only -1 that way, and would produce an
invalid result value for other negative values, possibly leading to
a crash (CVE-2010-0442).
Fix integer-to-bit-string conversions to handle the first fractional
byte correctly when the output bit width is wider than the given
integer by something other than a multiple of 8 bits (Tom)
Fix some cases of pathologically slow regular expression matching (Tom)
Fix assorted crashes in xml> processing caused by sloppy
memory management (Tom)
This is a back-patch of changes first applied in 8.4. The 8.3 code
was known buggy, but the new code was sufficiently different to not
want to back-patch it until it had gotten some field testing.
Fix bug with trying to update a field of an element of a
composite-type array column (Tom)
Fix the STOP WAL LOCATION> entry in backup history files to
report the next WAL segment's name when the end location is exactly at a
segment boundary (Itagaki Takahiro)
Fix some more cases of temporary-file leakage (Heikki)
This corrects a problem introduced in the previous minor release.
One case that failed is when a plpgsql function returning set is
called within another function's exception handler.
Improve constraint exclusion processing of boolean-variable cases,
in particular make it possible to exclude a partition that has a
bool_column = false> constraint (Tom)
When reading pg_hba.conf> and related files, do not treat
@something> as a file inclusion request if the @>
appears inside quote marks; also, never treat @> by itself
as a file inclusion request (Tom)
This prevents erratic behavior if a role or database name starts with
@>. If you need to include a file whose path name
contains spaces, you can still do so, but you must write
@"/path to/file"> rather than putting the quotes around
the whole construct.
Prevent infinite loop on some platforms if a directory is named as
an inclusion target in pg_hba.conf> and related files
(Tom)
Fix possible infinite loop if SSL_read> or
SSL_write> fails without setting errno> (Tom)
This is reportedly possible with some Windows versions of
openssl>.
Disallow GSSAPI> authentication on local connections,
since it requires a hostname to function correctly (Magnus)
Make ecpg> report the proper SQLSTATE if the connection
disappears (Michael)
Fix psql>'s numericlocale> option to not
format strings it shouldn't in latex and troff output formats (Heikki)
Make psql> return the correct exit status (3) when
ON_ERROR_STOP> and --single-transaction> are
both specified and an error occurs during the implied COMMIT>
(Bruce)
Fix plpgsql failure in one case where a composite column is set to NULL
(Tom)
Fix possible failure when calling PL/Perl functions from PL/PerlU
or vice versa (Tim Bunce)
Add volatile> markings in PL/Python to avoid possible
compiler-specific misbehavior (Zdenek Kotala)
Ensure PL/Tcl initializes the Tcl interpreter fully (Tom)
The only known symptom of this oversight is that the Tcl
clock> command misbehaves if using Tcl 8.5 or later.
Prevent crash in contrib/dblink> when too many key
columns are specified to a dblink_build_sql_*> function
(Rushabh Lathia, Joe Conway)
Allow zero-dimensional arrays in contrib/ltree> operations
(Tom)
This case was formerly rejected as an error, but it's more convenient to
treat it the same as a zero-element array. In particular this avoids
unnecessary failures when an ltree> operation is applied to the
result of ARRAY(SELECT ...)> and the sub-select returns no
rows.
Fix assorted crashes in contrib/xml2> caused by sloppy
memory management (Tom)
Make building of contrib/xml2> more robust on Windows
(Andrew)
Fix race condition in Windows signal handling (Radu Ilie)
One known symptom of this bug is that rows in pg_listener>
could be dropped under heavy load.
Update time zone data files to tzdata> release 2010e
for DST law changes in Bangladesh, Chile, Fiji, Mexico, Paraguay, Samoa.
Release 8.3.9Release date2009-12-14
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.8.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.9
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.8,
see the release notes for 8.3.8.
Changes
Protect against indirect security threats caused by index functions
changing session-local state (Gurjeet Singh, Tom)
This change prevents allegedly-immutable index functions from possibly
subverting a superuser's session (CVE-2009-4136).
Reject SSL certificates containing an embedded null byte in the common
name (CN) field (Magnus)
This prevents unintended matching of a certificate to a server or client
name during SSL validation (CVE-2009-4034).
Fix possible crash during backend-startup-time cache initialization (Tom)
Avoid crash on empty thesaurus dictionary (Tom)
Prevent signals from interrupting VACUUM> at unsafe times
(Alvaro)
This fix prevents a PANIC if a VACUUM FULL> is cancelled
after it's already committed its tuple movements, as well as transient
errors if a plain VACUUM> is interrupted after having
truncated the table.
Fix possible crash due to integer overflow in hash table size
calculation (Tom)
This could occur with extremely large planner estimates for the size of
a hashjoin's result.
Fix very rare crash in inet>/cidr> comparisons (Chris
Mikkelson)
Ensure that shared tuple-level locks held by prepared transactions are
not ignored (Heikki)
Fix premature drop of temporary files used for a cursor that is accessed
within a subtransaction (Heikki)
Fix memory leak in syslogger process when rotating to a new CSV logfile
(Tom)
Fix Windows permission-downgrade logic (Jesse Morris)
This fixes some cases where the database failed to start on Windows,
often with misleading error messages such as could not locate
matching postgres executable.
Fix incorrect logic for GiST index page splits, when the split depends
on a non-first column of the index (Paul Ramsey)
Don't error out if recycling or removing an old WAL file fails at the
end of checkpoint (Heikki)
It's better to treat the problem as non-fatal and allow the checkpoint
to complete. Future checkpoints will retry the removal. Such problems
are not expected in normal operation, but have been seen to be
caused by misdesigned Windows anti-virus and backup software.
Ensure WAL files aren't repeatedly archived on Windows (Heikki)
This is another symptom that could happen if some other process
interfered with deletion of a no-longer-needed file.
Fix PAM password processing to be more robust (Tom)
The previous code is known to fail with the combination of the Linux
pam_krb5> PAM module with Microsoft Active Directory as the
domain controller. It might have problems elsewhere too, since it was
making unjustified assumptions about what arguments the PAM stack would
pass to it.
Raise the maximum authentication token (Kerberos ticket) size in GSSAPI
and SSPI authentication methods (Ian Turner)
While the old 2000-byte limit was more than enough for Unix Kerberos
implementations, tickets issued by Windows Domain Controllers can be
much larger.
Re-enable collection of access statistics for sequences (Akira Kurosawa)
This used to work but was broken in 8.3.
Fix processing of ownership dependencies during CREATE OR
REPLACE FUNCTION> (Tom)
Fix incorrect handling of WHERE>
x>=x> conditions (Tom)
In some cases these could get ignored as redundant, but they aren't
— they're equivalent to x> IS NOT NULL>.
Make text search parser accept underscores in XML attributes (Peter)
Fix encoding handling in xml> binary input (Heikki)
If the XML header doesn't specify an encoding, we now assume UTF-8 by
default; the previous handling was inconsistent.
Fix bug with calling plperl> from plperlu> or vice
versa (Tom)
An error exit from the inner function could result in crashes due to
failure to re-select the correct Perl interpreter for the outer function.
Fix session-lifespan memory leak when a PL/Perl function is redefined
(Tom)
Ensure that Perl arrays are properly converted to
PostgreSQL> arrays when returned by a set-returning
PL/Perl function (Andrew Dunstan, Abhijit Menon-Sen)
This worked correctly already for non-set-returning functions.
Fix rare crash in exception processing in PL/Python (Peter)
In contrib/pg_standby>, disable triggering failover with a
signal on Windows (Fujii Masao)
This never did anything useful, because Windows doesn't have Unix-style
signals, but recent changes made it actually crash.
Ensure psql>'s flex module is compiled with the correct
system header definitions (Tom)
This fixes build failures on platforms where
--enable-largefile> causes incompatible changes in the
generated code.
Make the postmaster ignore any application_name> parameter in
connection request packets, to improve compatibility with future libpq
versions (Tom)
Update the timezone abbreviation files to match current reality (Joachim
Wieland)
This includes adding IDT> and SGT> to the default
timezone abbreviation set.
Update time zone data files to tzdata> release 2009s
for DST law changes in Antarctica, Argentina, Bangladesh, Fiji,
Novokuznetsk, Pakistan, Palestine, Samoa, Syria; also historical
corrections for Hong Kong.
Release 8.3.8Release date2009-09-09
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.7.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.8
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, if you have any hash indexes on interval> columns,
you must REINDEX> them after updating to 8.3.8.
Also, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.5,
see the release notes for 8.3.5.
Changes
Fix Windows shared-memory allocation code (Tsutomu Yamada, Magnus)
This bug led to the often-reported could not reattach
to shared memory> error message.
Force WAL segment switch during pg_start_backup()>
(Heikki)
This avoids corner cases that could render a base backup unusable.
Disallow RESET ROLE> and RESET SESSION
AUTHORIZATION> inside security-definer functions (Tom, Heikki)
This covers a case that was missed in the previous patch that
disallowed SET ROLE> and SET SESSION
AUTHORIZATION> inside security-definer functions.
(See CVE-2007-6600)
Make LOAD> of an already-loaded loadable module
into a no-op (Tom)
Formerly, LOAD> would attempt to unload and re-load the
module, but this is unsafe and not all that useful.
Disallow empty passwords during LDAP authentication (Magnus)
Fix handling of sub-SELECTs appearing in the arguments of
an outer-level aggregate function (Tom)
Fix bugs associated with fetching a whole-row value from the
output of a Sort or Materialize plan node (Tom)
Prevent synchronize_seqscans> from changing the results of
scrollable and WITH HOLD> cursors (Tom)
Revert planner change that disabled partial-index and constraint
exclusion optimizations when there were more than 100 clauses in
an AND or OR list (Tom)
Fix hash calculation for data type interval> (Tom)
This corrects wrong results for hash joins on interval values.
It also changes the contents of hash indexes on interval columns.
If you have any such indexes, you must REINDEX> them
after updating.
Treat to_char(..., 'TH')> as an uppercase ordinal
suffix with 'HH'>/'HH12'> (Heikki)
It was previously handled as 'th'> (lowercase).
Fix overflow for INTERVAL 'x> ms'
when x> is more than 2 million and integer
datetimes are in use (Alex Hunsaker)
Fix calculation of distance between a point and a line segment (Tom)
This led to incorrect results from a number of geometric operators.
Fix money> data type to work in locales where currency
amounts have no fractional digits, e.g. Japan (Itagaki Takahiro)
Fix LIKE> for case where pattern contains %_>
(Tom)
Properly round datetime input like
00:12:57.9999999999999999999999999999> (Tom)
Fix memory leaks in XML operations (Tom)
Fix poor choice of page split point in GiST R-tree operator classes
(Teodor)
Ensure that a fast shutdown> request will forcibly terminate
open sessions, even if a smart shutdown> was already in progress
(Fujii Masao)
Avoid performance degradation in bulk inserts into GIN indexes
when the input values are (nearly) in sorted order (Tom)
Correctly enforce NOT NULL domain constraints in some contexts in
PL/pgSQL (Tom)
Fix portability issues in plperl initialization (Andrew Dunstan)
Fix pg_ctl> to not go into an infinite loop if
postgresql.conf> is empty (Jeff Davis)
Improve pg_dump>'s efficiency when there are
many large objects (Tamas Vincze)
Use SIGUSR1>, not SIGQUIT>, as the
failover signal for pg_standby> (Heikki)
Make pg_standby>'s maxretries> option
behave as documented (Fujii Masao)
Make contrib/hstore> throw an error when a key or
value is too long to fit in its data structure, rather than
silently truncating it (Andrew Gierth)
Fix contrib/xml2>'s xslt_process()> to
properly handle the maximum number of parameters (twenty) (Tom)
Improve robustness of libpq>'s code to recover
from errors during COPY FROM STDIN> (Tom)
Avoid including conflicting readline and editline header files
when both libraries are installed (Zdenek Kotala)
Update time zone data files to tzdata> release 2009l
for DST law changes in Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan,
Argentina/San_Luis, Cuba, Jordan (historical correction only),
Mauritius, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia.
Release 8.3.7Release date2009-03-16
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.6.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.7
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.5,
see the release notes for 8.3.5.
Changes
Prevent error recursion crashes when encoding conversion fails (Tom)
This change extends fixes made in the last two minor releases for
related failure scenarios. The previous fixes were narrowly tailored
for the original problem reports, but we have now recognized that
any> error thrown by an encoding conversion function could
potentially lead to infinite recursion while trying to report the
error. The solution therefore is to disable translation and encoding
conversion and report the plain-ASCII form of any error message,
if we find we have gotten into a recursive error reporting situation.
(CVE-2009-0922)
Disallow CREATE CONVERSION> with the wrong encodings
for the specified conversion function (Heikki)
This prevents one possible scenario for encoding conversion failure.
The previous change is a backstop to guard against other kinds of
failures in the same area.
Fix xpath()> to not modify the path expression unless
necessary, and to make a saner attempt at it when necessary (Andrew)
The SQL standard suggests that xpath> should work on data
that is a document fragment, but libxml> doesn't support
that, and indeed it's not clear that this is sensible according to the
XPath standard. xpath> attempted to work around this
mismatch by modifying both the data and the path expression, but the
modification was buggy and could cause valid searches to fail. Now,
xpath> checks whether the data is in fact a well-formed
document, and if so invokes libxml> with no change to the
data or path expression. Otherwise, a different modification method
that is somewhat less likely to fail is used.
The new modification method is still not 100% satisfactory, and it
seems likely that no real solution is possible. This patch should
therefore be viewed as a band-aid to keep from breaking existing
applications unnecessarily. It is likely that
PostgreSQL> 8.4 will simply reject use of
xpath> on data that is not a well-formed document.
Fix core dump when to_char()> is given format codes that
are inappropriate for the type of the data argument (Tom)
Fix possible failure in text search when C locale is used with
a multi-byte encoding (Teodor)
Crashes were possible on platforms where wchar_t> is narrower
than int>; Windows in particular.
Fix extreme inefficiency in text search parser's handling of an
email-like string containing multiple @> characters (Heikki)
Fix planner problem with sub-SELECT> in the output list
of a larger subquery (Tom)
The known symptom of this bug is a failed to locate grouping
columns> error that is dependent on the datatype involved;
but there could be other issues as well.
Fix decompilation of CASE WHEN> with an implicit coercion
(Tom)
This mistake could lead to Assert failures in an Assert-enabled build,
or an unexpected CASE WHEN clause> error message in other
cases, when trying to examine or dump a view.
Fix possible misassignment of the owner of a TOAST table's rowtype (Tom)
If CLUSTER> or a rewriting variant of ALTER TABLE>
were executed by someone other than the table owner, the
pg_type> entry for the table's TOAST table would end up
marked as owned by that someone. This caused no immediate problems,
since the permissions on the TOAST rowtype aren't examined by any
ordinary database operation. However, it could lead to unexpected
failures if one later tried to drop the role that issued the command
(in 8.1 or 8.2), or owner of data type appears to be invalid>
warnings from pg_dump> after having done so (in 8.3).
Change UNLISTEN> to exit quickly if the current session has
never executed any LISTEN> command (Tom)
Most of the time this is not a particularly useful optimization, but
since DISCARD ALL> invokes UNLISTEN>, the previous
coding caused a substantial performance problem for applications that
made heavy use of DISCARD ALL>.
Fix PL/pgSQL to not treat INTO> after INSERT> as
an INTO-variables clause anywhere in the string, not only at the start;
in particular, don't fail for INSERT INTO> within
CREATE RULE> (Tom)
Clean up PL/pgSQL error status variables fully at block exit
(Ashesh Vashi and Dave Page)
This is not a problem for PL/pgSQL itself, but the omission could cause
the PL/pgSQL Debugger to crash while examining the state of a function.
Retry failed calls to CallNamedPipe()> on Windows
(Steve Marshall, Magnus)
It appears that this function can sometimes fail transiently;
we previously treated any failure as a hard error, which could
confuse LISTEN>/NOTIFY> as well as other
operations.
Add MUST> (Mauritius Island Summer Time) to the default list
of known timezone abbreviations (Xavier Bugaud)
Release 8.3.6Release date2009-02-02
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.5.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.6
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.5,
see the release notes for 8.3.5.
Changes
Make DISCARD ALL> release advisory locks, in addition
to everything it already did (Tom)
This was decided to be the most appropriate behavior. This could
affect existing applications, however.
Fix whole-index GiST scans to work correctly (Teodor)
This error could cause rows to be lost if a table is clustered
on a GiST index.
Fix crash of xmlconcat(NULL)> (Peter)
Fix possible crash in ispell> dictionary if high-bit-set
characters are used as flags (Teodor)
This is known to be done by one widely available Norwegian dictionary,
and the same condition may exist in others.
Fix misordering of pg_dump> output for composite types
(Tom)
The most likely problem was for user-defined operator classes to
be dumped after indexes or views that needed them.
Improve handling of URLs in headline()> function (Teodor)
Improve handling of overlength headlines in headline()>
function (Teodor)
Prevent possible Assert failure or misconversion if an encoding
conversion is created with the wrong conversion function for the
specified pair of encodings (Tom, Heikki)
Fix possible Assert failure if a statement executed in PL/pgSQL is
rewritten into another kind of statement, for example if an
INSERT> is rewritten into an UPDATE> (Heikki)
Ensure that a snapshot is available to datatype input functions (Tom)
This primarily affects domains that are declared with CHECK>
constraints involving user-defined stable or immutable functions. Such
functions typically fail if no snapshot has been set.
Make it safer for SPI-using functions to be used within datatype I/O;
in particular, to be used in domain check constraints (Tom)
Avoid unnecessary locking of small tables in VACUUM>
(Heikki)
Fix a problem that sometimes kept ALTER TABLE ENABLE/DISABLE
RULE> from being recognized by active sessions (Tom)
Fix a problem that made UPDATE RETURNING tableoid>
return zero instead of the correct OID (Tom)
Allow functions declared as taking ANYARRAY> to work on
the pg_statistic> columns of that type (Tom)
This used to work, but was unintentionally broken in 8.3.
Fix planner misestimation of selectivity when transitive equality
is applied to an outer-join clause (Tom)
This could result in bad plans for queries like
... from a left join b on a.a1 = b.b1 where a.a1 = 42 ...>
Improve optimizer's handling of long IN> lists (Tom)
This change avoids wasting large amounts of time on such lists
when constraint exclusion is enabled.
Prevent synchronous scan during GIN index build (Tom)
Because GIN is optimized for inserting tuples in increasing TID order,
choosing to use a synchronous scan could slow the build by a factor of
three or more.
Ensure that the contents of a holdable cursor don't depend on the
contents of TOAST tables (Tom)
Previously, large field values in a cursor result might be represented
as TOAST pointers, which would fail if the referenced table got dropped
before the cursor is read, or if the large value is deleted and then
vacuumed away. This cannot happen with an ordinary cursor,
but it could with a cursor that is held past its creating transaction.
Fix memory leak when a set-returning function is terminated without
reading its whole result (Tom)
Fix encoding conversion problems in XML functions when the database
encoding isn't UTF-8 (Tom)
Fix contrib/dblink>'s
dblink_get_result(text,bool)> function (Joe)
Fix possible garbage output from contrib/sslinfo> functions
(Tom)
Fix incorrect behavior of contrib/tsearch2> compatibility
trigger when it's fired more than once in a command (Teodor)
Fix possible mis-signaling in autovacuum (Heikki)
Support running as a service on Windows 7 beta (Dave and Magnus)
Fix ecpg>'s handling of varchar structs (Michael)
Fix configure> script to properly report failure when
unable to obtain linkage information for PL/Perl (Andrew)
Make all documentation reference pgsql-bugs> and/or
pgsql-hackers> as appropriate, instead of the
now-decommissioned pgsql-ports> and pgsql-patches>
mailing lists (Tom)
Update time zone data files to tzdata> release 2009a (for
Kathmandu and historical DST corrections in Switzerland, Cuba)
Release 8.3.5Release date2008-11-03
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.4.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.5
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.1,
see the release notes for 8.3.1. Also, if you were running a previous
8.3.X release, it is recommended to REINDEX> all GiST
indexes after the upgrade.
Changes
Fix GiST index corruption due to marking the wrong index entry
dead> after a deletion (Teodor)
This would result in index searches failing to find rows they
should have found. Corrupted indexes can be fixed with
REINDEX>.
Fix backend crash when the client encoding cannot represent a localized
error message (Tom)
We have addressed similar issues before, but it would still fail if
the character has no equivalent> message itself couldn't
be converted. The fix is to disable localization and send the plain
ASCII error message when we detect such a situation.
Fix possible crash in bytea>-to-XML mapping (Michael McMaster)
Fix possible crash when deeply nested functions are invoked from
a trigger (Tom)
Improve optimization of expression> IN>
(expression-list>) queries (Tom, per an idea from Robert
Haas)
Cases in which there are query variables on the right-hand side had been
handled less efficiently in 8.2.x and 8.3.x than in prior versions.
The fix restores 8.1 behavior for such cases.
Fix mis-expansion of rule queries when a sub-SELECT> appears
in a function call in FROM>, a multi-row VALUES>
list, or a RETURNING> list (Tom)
The usual symptom of this problem is an unrecognized node type>
error.
Fix Assert failure during rescan of an IS NULL>
search of a GiST index (Teodor)
Fix memory leak during rescan of a hashed aggregation plan (Neil)
Ensure an error is reported when a newly-defined PL/pgSQL trigger
function is invoked as a normal function (Tom)
Force a checkpoint before CREATE DATABASE> starts to copy
files (Heikki)
This prevents a possible failure if files had recently been deleted
in the source database.
Prevent possible collision of relfilenode> numbers
when moving a table to another tablespace with ALTER SET
TABLESPACE> (Heikki)
The command tried to re-use the existing filename, instead of
picking one that is known unused in the destination directory.
Fix incorrect text search headline generation when single query
item matches first word of text (Sushant Sinha)
Fix improper display of fractional seconds in interval values when
using a non-ISO datestyle in an
Make ILIKE> compare characters case-insensitively
even when they're escaped (Andrew)
Ensure DISCARD> is handled properly by statement logging (Tom)
Fix incorrect logging of last-completed-transaction time during
PITR recovery (Tom)
Ensure SPI_getvalue> and SPI_getbinval>
behave correctly when the passed tuple and tuple descriptor have
different numbers of columns (Tom)
This situation is normal when a table has had columns added or removed,
but these two functions didn't handle it properly.
The only likely consequence is an incorrect error indication.
Mark SessionReplicationRole> as PGDLLIMPORT>
so it can be used by Slony> on Windows (Magnus)
Fix small memory leak when using libpq>'s
gsslib> parameter (Magnus)
The space used by the parameter string was not freed at connection
close.
Ensure libgssapi> is linked into libpq>
if needed (Markus Schaaf)
Fix ecpg>'s parsing of CREATE ROLE> (Michael)
Fix recent breakage of pg_ctl restart> (Tom)
Ensure pg_control> is opened in binary mode
(Itagaki Takahiro)
pg_controldata> and pg_resetxlog>
did this incorrectly, and so could fail on Windows.
Update time zone data files to tzdata> release 2008i (for
DST law changes in Argentina, Brazil, Mauritius, Syria)
Release 8.3.4Release date2008-09-22
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.3.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.4
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.1,
see the release notes for 8.3.1.
Changes
Fix bug in btree WAL recovery code (Heikki)
Recovery failed if the WAL ended partway through a page split operation.
Fix potential use of wrong cutoff XID for HOT page pruning (Alvaro)
This error created a risk of corruption in system
catalogs that are consulted by VACUUM>: dead tuple versions
might be removed too soon. The impact of this on actual database
operations would be minimal, since the system doesn't follow MVCC
rules while examining catalogs, but it might result in transiently
wrong output from pg_dump> or other client programs.
Fix potential miscalculation of datfrozenxid> (Alvaro)
This error may explain some recent reports of failure to remove old
pg_clog> data.
Fix incorrect HOT updates after pg_class> is reindexed
(Tom)
Corruption of pg_class> could occur if REINDEX
TABLE pg_class> was followed in the same session by an ALTER
TABLE RENAME> or ALTER TABLE SET SCHEMA> command.
Fix missed combo cid> case (Karl Schnaitter)
This error made rows incorrectly invisible to a transaction in which they
had been deleted by multiple subtransactions that all aborted.
Prevent autovacuum from crashing if the table it's currently
checking is deleted at just the wrong time (Alvaro)
Widen local lock counters from 32 to 64 bits (Tom)
This responds to reports that the counters could overflow in
sufficiently long transactions, leading to unexpected lock is
already held> errors.
Fix possible duplicate output of tuples during a GiST index scan (Teodor)
Regenerate foreign key checking queries from scratch when either
table is modified (Tom)
Previously, 8.3 would attempt to replan the query, but would work from
previously generated query text. This led to failures if a
table or column was renamed.
Fix missed permissions checks when a view contains a simple
UNION ALL> construct (Heikki)
Permissions for the referenced tables were checked properly, but not
permissions for the view itself.
Add checks in executor startup to ensure that the tuples produced by an
INSERT> or UPDATE> will match the target table's
current rowtype (Tom)
This situation is believed to be impossible in 8.3, but it can happen in
prior releases, so a check seems prudent.
Fix possible repeated drops during DROP OWNED> (Tom)
This would typically result in strange errors such as cache
lookup failed for relation NNN>.
Fix several memory leaks in XML operations (Kris Jurka, Tom)
Fix xmlserialize()> to raise error properly for
unacceptable target data type (Tom)
Fix a couple of places that mis-handled multibyte characters in text
search configuration file parsing (Tom)
Certain characters occurring in configuration files would always cause
invalid byte sequence for encoding> failures.
Provide file name and line number location for all errors reported
in text search configuration files (Tom)
Fix AT TIME ZONE> to first try to interpret its timezone
argument as a timezone abbreviation, and only try it as a full timezone
name if that fails, rather than the other way around as formerly (Tom)
The timestamp input functions have always resolved ambiguous zone names
in this order. Making AT TIME ZONE> do so as well improves
consistency, and fixes a compatibility bug introduced in 8.1:
in ambiguous cases we now behave the same as 8.0 and before did,
since in the older versions AT TIME ZONE> accepted
only> abbreviations.
Fix datetime input functions to correctly detect integer overflow when
running on a 64-bit platform (Tom)
Prevent integer overflows during units conversion when displaying a
configuration parameter that has units (Tom)
Improve performance of writing very long log messages to syslog (Tom)
Allow spaces in the suffix part of an LDAP URL in
pg_hba.conf> (Tom)
Fix bug in backwards scanning of a cursor on a SELECT DISTINCT
ON> query (Tom)
Fix planner bug that could improperly push down IS NULL>
tests below an outer join (Tom)
This was triggered by occurrence of IS NULL> tests for
the same relation in all arms of an upper OR> clause.
Fix planner bug with nested sub-select expressions (Tom)
If the outer sub-select has no direct dependency on the parent query,
but the inner one does, the outer value might not get recalculated
for new parent query rows.
Fix planner to estimate that GROUP BY> expressions yielding
boolean results always result in two groups, regardless of the
expressions' contents (Tom)
This is very substantially more accurate than the regular GROUP
BY> estimate for certain boolean tests like col>
IS NULL>.
Fix PL/PgSQL to not fail when a FOR> loop's target variable
is a record containing composite-type fields (Tom)
Fix PL/Tcl to behave correctly with Tcl 8.5, and to be more careful
about the encoding of data sent to or from Tcl (Tom)
Improve performance of PQescapeBytea()> (Rudolf Leitgeb)
On Windows, work around a Microsoft bug by preventing
libpq> from trying to send more than 64kB per system call
(Magnus)
Fix ecpg> to handle variables properly in SET>
commands (Michael)
Improve pg_dump> and pg_restore>'s
error reporting after failure to send a SQL command (Tom)
Fix pg_ctl> to properly preserve postmaster
command-line arguments across a restart> (Bruce)
Fix erroneous WAL file cutoff point calculation in
pg_standby> (Simon)
Update time zone data files to tzdata> release 2008f (for
DST law changes in Argentina, Bahamas, Brazil, Mauritius, Morocco,
Pakistan, Palestine, and Paraguay)
Release 8.3.3Release date2008-06-12
This release contains one serious and one minor bug fix over 8.3.2.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.3
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.1,
see the release notes for 8.3.1.
Changes
Make pg_get_ruledef()> parenthesize negative constants (Tom)
Before this fix, a negative constant in a view or rule might be dumped
as, say, -42::integer>, which is subtly incorrect: it should
be (-42)::integer> due to operator precedence rules.
Usually this would make little difference, but it could interact with
another recent patch to cause
PostgreSQL> to reject what had been a valid
SELECT DISTINCT> view query. Since this could result in
pg_dump> output failing to reload, it is being treated
as a high-priority fix. The only released versions in which dump
output is actually incorrect are 8.3.1 and 8.2.7.
Make ALTER AGGREGATE ... OWNER TO> update
pg_shdepend> (Tom)
This oversight could lead to problems if the aggregate was later
involved in a DROP OWNED> or REASSIGN OWNED>
operation.
Release 8.3.2Release datenever released
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.1.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.2
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.1,
see the release notes for 8.3.1.
Changes
Fix ERRORDATA_STACK_SIZE exceeded crash that
occurred on Windows when using UTF-8 database encoding and a different
client encoding (Tom)
Fix incorrect archive truncation point calculation for the
%r> macro in recovery_command> parameters
(Simon)
This could lead to data loss if a warm-standby script relied on
%r> to decide when to throw away WAL segment files.
Fix ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN ... PRIMARY KEY> so that the new
column is correctly checked to see if it's been initialized to all
non-nulls (Brendan Jurd)
Previous versions neglected to check this requirement at all.
Fix REASSIGN OWNED> so that it works on procedural
languages too (Alvaro)
Fix problems with SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE> occurring as a
subquery in a query with a non-SELECT> top-level operation
(Tom)
Fix possible CREATE TABLE> failure when inheriting the
same> constraint from multiple parent relations that
inherited that constraint from a common ancestor (Tom)
Fix pg_get_ruledef()> to show the alias, if any, attached
to the target table of an UPDATE> or DELETE>
(Tom)
Restore the pre-8.3 behavior that an out-of-range block number in a
TID being used in a TidScan plan results in silently not matching any
rows (Tom)
8.3.0 and 8.3.1 threw an error instead.
Fix GIN bug that could result in a too many LWLocks
taken failure (Teodor)
Fix broken GiST comparison function for tsquery> (Teodor)
Fix tsvector_update_trigger()> and ts_stat()>
to accept domains over the types they expect to work with (Tom)
Fix failure to support enum data types as foreign keys (Tom)
Avoid possible crash when decompressing corrupted data
(Zdenek Kotala)
Fix race conditions between delayed unlinks and DROP
DATABASE> (Heikki)
In the worst case this could result in deleting a newly created table
in a new database that happened to get the same OID as the
recently-dropped one; but of course that is an extremely
low-probability scenario.
Repair two places where SIGTERM exit of a backend could leave corrupted
state in shared memory (Tom)
Neither case is very important if SIGTERM is used to shut down the
whole database cluster together, but there was a problem if someone
tried to SIGTERM individual backends.
Fix possible crash due to incorrect plan generated for an
x> IN (SELECT y>
FROM ...) clause when x> and y>
have different data types; and make sure the behavior is semantically
correct when the conversion from y>'s type to
x>'s type is lossy (Tom)
Fix oversight that prevented the planner from substituting known Param
values as if they were constants (Tom)
This mistake partially disabled optimization of unnamed
extended-Query statements in 8.3.0 and 8.3.1: in particular the
LIKE-to-indexscan optimization would never be applied if the LIKE
pattern was passed as a parameter, and constraint exclusion
depending on a parameter value didn't work either.
Fix planner failure when an indexable MIN> or
MAX> aggregate is used with DISTINCT> or
ORDER BY> (Tom)
Fix planner to ensure it never uses a physical tlist> for a
plan node that is feeding a Sort node (Tom)
This led to the sort having to push around more data than it really
needed to, since unused column values were included in the sorted
data.
Avoid unnecessary copying of query strings (Tom)
This fixes a performance problem introduced in 8.3.0 when a very large
number of commands are submitted as a single query string.
Make TransactionIdIsCurrentTransactionId()> use binary
search instead of linear search when checking child-transaction XIDs
(Heikki)
This fixes some cases in which 8.3.0 was significantly
slower than earlier releases.
Fix conversions between ISO-8859-5 and other encodings to handle
Cyrillic Yo> characters (e> and E> with
two dots) (Sergey Burladyan)
Fix several datatype input functions, notably array_in()>,
that were allowing unused bytes in their results to contain
uninitialized, unpredictable values (Tom)
This could lead to failures in which two apparently identical literal
values were not seen as equal, resulting in the parser complaining
about unmatched ORDER BY> and DISTINCT>
expressions.
Fix a corner case in regular-expression substring matching
(substring(string> from
pattern>)) (Tom)
The problem occurs when there is a match to the pattern overall but
the user has specified a parenthesized subexpression and that
subexpression hasn't got a match. An example is
substring('foo' from 'foo(bar)?')>.
This should return NULL, since (bar)> isn't matched, but
it was mistakenly returning the whole-pattern match instead (ie,
foo>).
Prevent cancellation of an auto-vacuum that was launched to prevent
XID wraparound (Alvaro)
Improve ANALYZE>'s handling of in-doubt tuples (those
inserted or deleted by a not-yet-committed transaction) so that the
counts it reports to the stats collector are more likely to be correct
(Pavan Deolasee)
Fix initdb> to reject a relative path for its
--xlogdir> (-X>) option (Tom)
Make psql> print tab characters as an appropriate
number of spaces, rather than \x09 as was done in
8.3.0 and 8.3.1 (Bruce)
Update time zone data files to tzdata> release 2008c (for
DST law changes in Morocco, Iraq, Choibalsan, Pakistan, Syria, Cuba, and
Argentina/San_Luis)
Add ECPGget_PGconn()> function to
ecpglib> (Michael)
Fix incorrect result from ecpg>'s
PGTYPEStimestamp_sub()> function (Michael)
Fix handling of continuation line markers in ecpg>
(Michael)
Fix possible crashes in contrib/cube> functions (Tom)
Fix core dump in contrib/xml2>'s
xpath_table()> function when the input query returns a
NULL value (Tom)
Fix contrib/xml2>'s makefile to not override
CFLAGS>, and make it auto-configure properly for
libxslt> present or not (Tom)
Release 8.3.1Release date2008-03-17
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.0.
For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see
.
Migration to Version 8.3.1
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X.
However, you might need to REINDEX> indexes on textual
columns after updating, if you are affected by the Windows locale
issue described below.
Changes
Fix character string comparison for Windows locales that consider
different character combinations as equal (Tom)
This fix applies only on Windows and only when using UTF-8
database encoding. The same fix was made for all other cases
over two years ago, but Windows with UTF-8 uses a separate code
path that was not updated. If you are using a locale that
considers some non-identical strings as equal, you may need to
REINDEX> to fix existing indexes on textual columns.
Repair corner-case bugs in VACUUM FULL> (Tom)
A potential deadlock between concurrent VACUUM FULL>
operations on different system catalogs was introduced in 8.2.
This has now been corrected. 8.3 made this worse because the
deadlock could occur within a critical code section, making it
a PANIC rather than just ERROR condition.
Also, a VACUUM FULL> that failed partway through
vacuuming a system catalog could result in cache corruption in
concurrent database sessions.
Another VACUUM FULL> bug introduced in 8.3 could
result in a crash or out-of-memory report when dealing with
pages containing no live tuples.
Fix misbehavior of foreign key checks involving character>
or bit> columns (Tom)
If the referencing column were of a different but compatible type
(for instance varchar>), the constraint was enforced incorrectly.
Avoid needless deadlock failures in no-op foreign-key checks (Stephan
Szabo, Tom)
Fix possible core dump when re-planning a prepared query (Tom)
This bug affected only protocol-level prepare operations, not
SQL PREPARE>, and so tended to be seen only with
JDBC, DBI, and other client-side drivers that use prepared
statements heavily.
Fix possible failure when re-planning a query that calls an SPI-using
function (Tom)
Fix failure in row-wise comparisons involving columns of different
datatypes (Tom)
Fix longstanding LISTEN>/NOTIFY>
race condition (Tom)
In rare cases a session that had just executed a
LISTEN> might not get a notification, even though
one would be expected because the concurrent transaction executing
NOTIFY> was observed to commit later.
A side effect of the fix is that a transaction that has executed
a not-yet-committed LISTEN> command will not see any
row in pg_listener> for the LISTEN>,
should it choose to look; formerly it would have. This behavior
was never documented one way or the other, but it is possible that
some applications depend on the old behavior.
Disallow LISTEN> and UNLISTEN> within a
prepared transaction (Tom)
This was formerly allowed but trying to do it had various unpleasant
consequences, notably that the originating backend could not exit
as long as an UNLISTEN> remained uncommitted.
Disallow dropping a temporary table within a
prepared transaction (Heikki)
This was correctly disallowed by 8.1, but the check was inadvertently
broken in 8.2 and 8.3.
Fix rare crash when an error occurs during a query using a hash index
(Heikki)
Fix incorrect comparison of tsquery> values (Teodor)
Fix incorrect behavior of LIKE> with non-ASCII characters
in single-byte encodings (Rolf Jentsch)
Disable xmlvalidate> (Tom)
This function should have been removed before 8.3 release, but
was inadvertently left in the source code. It poses a small
security risk since unprivileged users could use it to read the
first few characters of any file accessible to the server.
Fix memory leaks in certain usages of set-returning functions (Neil)
Make encode(bytea>, 'escape')> convert all
high-bit-set byte values into \>nnn> octal
escape sequences (Tom)
This is necessary to avoid encoding problems when the database
encoding is multi-byte. This change could pose compatibility issues
for applications that are expecting specific results from
encode>.
Fix input of datetime values for February 29 in years BC (Tom)
The former coding was mistaken about which years were leap years.
Fix unrecognized node type> error in some variants of
ALTER OWNER> (Tom)
Avoid tablespace permissions errors in CREATE TABLE LIKE
INCLUDING INDEXES> (Tom)
Ensure pg_stat_activity>.waiting> flag
is cleared when a lock wait is aborted (Tom)
Fix handling of process permissions on Windows Vista (Dave, Magnus)
In particular, this fix allows starting the server as the Administrator
user.
Update time zone data files to tzdata> release 2008a
(in particular, recent Chile changes); adjust timezone abbreviation
VET> (Venezuela) to mean UTC-4:30, not UTC-4:00 (Tom)
Fix ecpg> problems with arrays (Michael)
Fix pg_ctl> to correctly extract the postmaster's port
number from command-line options (Itagaki Takahiro, Tom)
Previously, pg_ctl start -w> could try to contact the
postmaster on the wrong port, leading to bogus reports of startup
failure.
Use
This is known to be necessary when building PostgreSQL>
with gcc> 4.3 or later.
Enable building contrib/uuid-ossp> with MSVC (Hiroshi Saito)
Release 8.3Release date2008-02-04Overview
With significant new functionality and performance enhancements,
this release represents a major leap forward for
PostgreSQL>. This was made possible by a growing
community that has dramatically accelerated the pace of
development. This release adds the following major features:
Full text search is integrated into the core database system
Support for the SQL/XML standard, including new operators and an
XML data type
Enumerated data types (ENUM)
Arrays of composite types
Universally Unique Identifier (UUID>) data type
Add control over whether NULL>s sort first or last
Updatable cursors
Server configuration parameters can now be set on a per-function
basis
User-defined types can now have type modifiers
Automatically re-plan cached queries when table
definitions change or statistics are updated
Numerous improvements in logging and statistics collection
Support Security Service Provider Interface (SSPI>) for
authentication on Windows
Support multiple concurrent autovacuum processes, and other
autovacuum improvements
Allow the whole PostgreSQL> distribution to be compiled
with Microsoft Visual C++>
Major performance improvements are listed below. Most of
these enhancements are automatic and do not require user changes or
tuning:
Asynchronous commit delays writes to WAL during transaction commit
Checkpoint writes can be spread over a longer time period to smooth
the I/O spike during each checkpoint
Heap-Only Tuples (HOT>) accelerate space reuse for
most UPDATE>s and DELETE>s
Just-in-time background writer strategy improves disk write
efficiency
Using non-persistent transaction IDs for read-only transactions
reduces overhead and VACUUM> requirements
Per-field and per-row storage overhead has been reduced
Large sequential scans no longer force out frequently used
cached pages
Concurrent large sequential scans can now share disk reads
ORDER BY ... LIMIT> can be done without sorting
The above items are explained in more detail in the sections below.
Migration to Version 8.3
A dump/restore using pg_dump is
required for those wishing to migrate data from any previous
release.
Observe the following incompatibilities:
General
Non-character data types are no longer automatically cast to
TEXT> (Peter, Tom)
Previously, if a non-character value was supplied to an operator or
function that requires text> input, it was automatically
cast to text>, for most (though not all) built-in data types.
This no longer happens: an explicit cast to text> is now
required for all non-character-string types. For example, these
expressions formerly worked:
substr(current_date, 1, 4)
23 LIKE '2%'
but will now draw function does not exist> and operator
does not exist> errors respectively. Use an explicit cast instead:
substr(current_date::text, 1, 4)
23::text LIKE '2%'
(Of course, you can use the more verbose CAST()> syntax too.)
The reason for the change is that these automatic casts too often caused
surprising behavior. An example is that in previous releases, this
expression was accepted but did not do what was expected:
current_date < 2017-11-17
This is actually comparing a date to an integer, which should be
(and now is) rejected — but in the presence of automatic
casts both sides were cast to text> and a textual comparison
was done, because the text < text> operator was able
to match the expression when no other <> operator could.
Types char(n>) and
varchar(n>) still cast to text>
automatically. Also, automatic casting to text> still works for
inputs to the concatenation (||>) operator, so long as least
one input is a character-string type.
Full text search features from contrib/tsearch2> have
been moved into the core server, with some minor syntax changes
contrib/tsearch2> now contains a compatibility
interface.
ARRAY(SELECT ...), where the SELECT>
returns no rows, now returns an empty array, rather than NULL
(Tom)
The array type name for a base data type is no longer always the base
type's name with an underscore prefix
The old naming convention is still honored when possible, but
application code should no longer depend on it. Instead
use the new pg_type.typarray column to
identify the array data type associated with a given type.
ORDER BY ... USING> operator> must now
use a less-than or greater-than operator> that is
defined in a btree operator class
This restriction was added to prevent inconsistent results.
SET LOCAL changes now persist until
the end of the outermost transaction, unless rolled back (Tom)
Previously SET LOCAL's effects were lost
after subtransaction commit (RELEASE SAVEPOINT>
or exit from a PL/pgSQL exception block).
Commands rejected in transaction blocks are now also rejected in
multiple-statement query strings (Tom)
For example, "BEGIN; DROP DATABASE; COMMIT"> will now be
rejected even if submitted as a single query message.
ROLLBACK> outside a transaction block now
issues NOTICE> instead of WARNING> (Bruce)
Prevent NOTIFY/LISTEN/UNLISTEN
from accepting schema-qualified names (Bruce)
Formerly, these commands accepted schema.relation> but
ignored the schema part, which was confusing.
ALTER SEQUENCE> no longer affects the sequence's
currval()> state (Tom)
Foreign keys now must match indexable conditions for
cross-data-type references (Tom)
This improves semantic consistency and helps avoid
performance problems.
Restrict object size functions to users who have reasonable
permissions to view such information (Tom)
For example, pg_database_size() now requires
CONNECT> permission, which is granted to everyone by
default. pg_tablespace_size() requires
CREATE> permission in the tablespace, or is allowed if
the tablespace is the default tablespace for the database.
Remove the undocumented !!=> (not in) operator (Tom)
NOT IN (SELECT ...) is the proper way to
perform this operation.
Internal hashing functions are now more uniformly-distributed (Tom)
If application code was computing and storing hash values using
internal PostgreSQL> hashing functions, the hash
values must be regenerated.
C-code conventions for handling variable-length data values
have changed (Greg Stark, Tom)
The new SET_VARSIZE()> macro must> be used
to set the length of generated varlena> values. Also, it
might be necessary to expand (de-TOAST) input values
in more cases.
Continuous archiving no longer reports each successful archive
operation to the server logs unless DEBUG> level is used
(Simon)
Configuration Parameters
Numerous changes in administrative server parameters
bgwriter_lru_percent>,
bgwriter_all_percent>,
bgwriter_all_maxpages>,
stats_start_collector>, and
stats_reset_on_server_start> are removed.
redirect_stderr> is renamed to
logging_collector>.
stats_command_string> is renamed to
track_activities>.
stats_block_level> and stats_row_level>
are merged into track_counts>.
A new boolean configuration parameter, archive_mode>,
controls archiving. Autovacuum's default settings have changed.
Remove stats_start_collector parameter (Tom)
We now always start the collector process, unless UDP>
socket creation fails.
Remove stats_reset_on_server_start parameter (Tom)
This was removed because pg_stat_reset()
can be used for this purpose.
Commenting out a parameter in postgresql.conf> now
causes it to revert to its default value (Joachim Wieland)
Previously, commenting out an entry left the parameter's value unchanged
until the next server restart.
Character Encodings
Add more checks for invalidly-encoded data (Andrew)
This change plugs some holes that existed in literal backslash
escape string processing and COPY escape
processing. Now the de-escaped string is rechecked to see if the
result created an invalid multi-byte character.
Disallow database encodings that are inconsistent with the server's
locale setting (Tom)
On most platforms, C> locale is the only locale that
will work with any database encoding. Other locale settings imply
a specific encoding and will misbehave if the database encoding
is something different. (Typical symptoms include bogus textual
sort order and wrong results from upper()> or
lower()>.) The server now rejects attempts to create
databases that have an incompatible encoding.
Ensure that chr() cannot create
invalidly-encoded values (Andrew)
In UTF8-encoded databases the argument of chr() is
now treated as a Unicode code point. In other multi-byte encodings
chr()'s argument must designate a 7-bit ASCII
character. Zero is no longer accepted.
ascii() has been adjusted to match.
Adjust convert() behavior to ensure encoding
validity (Andrew)
The two argument form of convert() has been
removed. The three argument form now takes a bytea
first argument and returns a bytea. To cover the
loss of functionality, three new functions have been added:
convert_from(bytea, name) returns
text> — converts the first argument from the named
encoding to the database encoding
convert_to(text, name) returns
bytea> — converts the first argument from the
database encoding to the named encoding
length(bytea, name) returns
integer> — gives the length of the first
argument in characters in the named encoding
Remove convert(argument USING conversion_name)
(Andrew)
Its behavior did not match the SQL standard.
Make JOHAB encoding client-only (Tatsuo)
JOHAB is not safe as a server-side encoding.
Changes
Below you will find a detailed account of the
changes between PostgreSQL 8.3 and
the previous major release.
Performance
Asynchronous commit delays writes to WAL during transaction commit
(Simon)
This feature dramatically increases performance for short data-modifying
transactions. The disadvantage is that because disk writes are delayed,
if the database or operating system crashes before data is written to
the disk, committed data will be lost. This feature is useful for
applications that can accept some data loss. Unlike turning off
fsync, using asynchronous commit does not put
database consistency at risk; the worst case is that after a crash the
last few reportedly-committed transactions might not be committed after
all.
This feature is enabled by turning off synchronous_commit>
(which can be done per-session or per-transaction, if some transactions
are critical and others are not).
wal_writer_delay> can be adjusted to control the maximum
delay before transactions actually reach disk.
Checkpoint writes can be spread over a longer time period to smooth
the I/O spike during each checkpoint (Itagaki Takahiro and Heikki
Linnakangas)
Previously all modified buffers were forced to disk as quickly as
possible during a
checkpoint, causing an I/O spike that decreased server performance.
This new approach spreads out disk writes during checkpoints,
reducing peak I/O usage. (User-requested and shutdown checkpoints
are still written as quickly as possible.)
Heap-Only Tuples (HOT>) accelerate space reuse for most
UPDATE>s and DELETE>s (Pavan Deolasee, with
ideas from many others)
UPDATE>s and DELETE>s leave dead tuples
behind, as do failed INSERT>s. Previously only
VACUUM> could reclaim space taken by dead tuples. With
HOT> dead tuple space can be automatically reclaimed at
the time of INSERT> or UPDATE> if no changes
are made to indexed columns. This allows for more consistent
performance. Also, HOT> avoids adding duplicate index
entries.
Just-in-time background writer strategy improves disk write
efficiency (Greg Smith, Itagaki Takahiro)
This greatly reduces the need for manual tuning of the background
writer.
Per-field and per-row storage overhead have been reduced
(Greg Stark, Heikki Linnakangas)
Variable-length data types with data values less than 128 bytes long
will see a storage decrease of 3 to 6 bytes. For example, two adjacent
char(1) fields now use 4 bytes instead of 16. Row headers
are also 4 bytes shorter than before.
Using non-persistent transaction IDs for read-only transactions
reduces overhead and VACUUM> requirements (Florian Pflug)
Non-persistent transaction IDs do not increment the global
transaction counter. Therefore, they reduce the load on
pg_clog> and increase the time between forced
vacuums to prevent transaction ID wraparound.
Other performance
improvements were also made that should improve concurrency.
Avoid incrementing the command counter after a read-only command (Tom)
There was formerly a hard limit of 232>
(4 billion) commands per transaction. Now only commands that
actually changed the database count, so while this limit still
exists, it should be significantly less annoying.
Create a dedicated WAL> writer process to off-load
work from backends (Simon)
Skip unnecessary WAL writes for CLUSTER and
COPY (Simon)
Unless WAL archiving is enabled, the system now avoids WAL writes
for CLUSTER and just fsync()>s the
table at the end of the command. It also does the same for
COPY if the table was created in the same
transaction.
Large sequential scans no longer force out frequently used
cached pages (Simon, Heikki, Tom)
Concurrent large sequential scans can now share disk reads (Jeff Davis)
This is accomplished by starting the new sequential scan in the
middle of the table (where another sequential scan is already
in-progress) and wrapping around to the beginning to finish. This
can affect the order of returned rows in a query that does not
specify ORDER BY>. The synchronize_seqscans>
configuration parameter can be used to disable this if necessary.
ORDER BY ... LIMIT> can be done without sorting
(Greg Stark)
This is done by sequentially scanning the table and tracking just
the top N> candidate rows, rather than performing a
full sort of the entire table. This is useful when there is no
matching index and the LIMIT> is not large.
Put a rate limit on messages sent to the statistics
collector by backends
(Tom)
This reduces overhead for short transactions, but might sometimes
increase the delay before statistics are tallied.
Improve hash join performance for cases with many NULLs (Tom)
Speed up operator lookup for cases with non-exact datatype matches (Tom)
Server
Autovacuum is now enabled by default (Alvaro)
Several changes were made to eliminate disadvantages of having
autovacuum enabled, thereby justifying the change in default.
Several other autovacuum parameter defaults were also modified.
Support multiple concurrent autovacuum processes (Alvaro, Itagaki
Takahiro)
This allows multiple vacuums to run concurrently. This prevents
vacuuming of a large table from delaying vacuuming of smaller tables.
Automatically re-plan cached queries when table
definitions change or statistics are updated (Tom)
Previously PL/PgSQL functions that referenced temporary tables
would fail if the temporary table was dropped and recreated
between function invocations, unless EXECUTE> was
used. This improvement fixes that problem and many related issues.
Add a temp_tablespaces parameter to control
the tablespaces for temporary tables and files (Jaime Casanova,
Albert Cervera, Bernd Helmle)
This parameter defines a list of tablespaces to be used. This
enables spreading the I/O load across multiple tablespaces. A random
tablespace is chosen each time a temporary object is created.
Temporary files are no longer stored in per-database
pgsql_tmp/ directories but in per-tablespace
directories.
Place temporary tables' TOAST tables in special schemas named
pg_toast_temp_nnn> (Tom)
This allows low-level code to recognize these tables as temporary,
which enables various optimizations such as not WAL-logging changes
and using local rather than shared buffers for access. This also
fixes a bug wherein backends unexpectedly held open file references
to temporary TOAST tables.
Fix problem that a constant flow of new connection requests could
indefinitely delay the postmaster from completing a shutdown or
a crash restart (Tom)
Guard against a very-low-probability data loss scenario by preventing
re-use of a deleted table's relfilenode until after the next
checkpoint (Heikki)
Fix CREATE CONSTRAINT TRIGGER>
to convert old-style foreign key trigger definitions into regular
foreign key constraints (Tom)
This will ease porting of foreign key constraints carried forward from
pre-7.3 databases, if they were never converted using
contrib/adddepend>.
Fix DEFAULT NULL> to override inherited defaults (Tom)
DEFAULT NULL> was formerly considered a noise phrase, but it
should (and now does) override non-null defaults that would otherwise
be inherited from a parent table or domain.
Add new encodings EUC_JIS_2004 and SHIFT_JIS_2004 (Tatsuo)
These new encodings can be converted to and from UTF-8.
Change server startup log message from database system is
ready to database system is ready to accept
connections, and adjust its timing
The message now appears only when the postmaster is really ready
to accept connections.
Monitoring
Add log_autovacuum_min_duration parameter to
support configurable logging of autovacuum activity (Simon, Alvaro)
Add log_lock_waits parameter to log lock waiting
(Simon)
Add log_temp_files parameter to log temporary
file usage (Bill Moran)
Add log_checkpoints parameter to improve logging
of checkpoints (Greg Smith, Heikki)
log_line_prefix now supports
%s and %c escapes in all
processes (Andrew)
Previously these escapes worked only for user sessions, not for
background database processes.
Add log_restartpoints to control logging of
point-in-time recovery restart points (Simon)
Last transaction end time is now logged at end of recovery and at
each logged restart point (Simon)
Autovacuum now reports its activity start time in
pg_stat_activity (Tom)
Allow server log output in comma-separated value (CSV) format (Arul
Shaji, Greg Smith, Andrew Dunstan)
CSV-format log files can easily be loaded into a database table for
subsequent analysis.
Use PostgreSQL-supplied timezone support for formatting timestamps
displayed in the server log (Tom)
This avoids Windows-specific problems with localized time zone
names that are in the wrong encoding. There is a new
log_timezone> parameter that controls the timezone
used in log messages, independently of the client-visible
timezone> parameter.
New system view pg_stat_bgwriter displays
statistics about background writer activity (Magnus)
Add new columns for database-wide tuple statistics to
pg_stat_database (Magnus)
Add an xact_start (transaction start time) column to
pg_stat_activity (Neil)
This makes it easier to identify long-running transactions.
Add n_live_tuples> and n_dead_tuples> columns
to pg_stat_all_tables and related views (Glen
Parker)
Merge stats_block_level> and stats_row_level>
parameters into a single parameter track_counts>, which
controls all messages sent to the statistics collector process
(Tom)
Rename stats_command_string parameter to
track_activities (Tom)
Fix statistical counting of live and dead tuples to recognize that
committed and aborted transactions have different effects (Tom)
Authentication
Support Security Service Provider Interface (SSPI>) for
authentication on Windows (Magnus)
Support GSSAPI authentication (Henry Hotz, Magnus)
This should be preferred to native Kerberos authentication because
GSSAPI is an industry standard.
Support a global SSL configuration file (Victor Wagner)
Add ssl_ciphers> parameter to control accepted SSL ciphers
(Victor Wagner)
Add a Kerberos realm parameter, krb_realm> (Magnus)
Write-Ahead Log (WAL>) and Continuous Archiving
Change the timestamps recorded in transaction WAL records from
time_t to TimestampTz representation (Tom)
This provides sub-second resolution in WAL, which can be useful for
point-in-time recovery.
Reduce WAL disk space needed by warm standby servers (Simon)
This change allows a warm standby server to pass the name of the earliest
still-needed WAL file to the recovery script, allowing automatic removal
of no-longer-needed WAL files. This is done using %r> in
the restore_command parameter of
recovery.conf.
New boolean configuration parameter, archive_mode>,
controls archiving (Simon)
Previously setting archive_command> to an empty string
turned off archiving. Now archive_mode> turns archiving
on and off, independently of archive_command>. This is
useful for stopping archiving temporarily.
Queries
Full text search is integrated into the core database
system (Teodor, Oleg)
Text search has been improved, moved into the core code, and is now
installed by default. contrib/tsearch2> now contains
a compatibility interface.
Add control over whether NULL>s sort first or last (Teodor, Tom)
The syntax is ORDER BY ... NULLS FIRST/LAST>.
Allow per-column ascending/descending (ASC>/DESC>)
ordering options for indexes (Teodor, Tom)
Previously a query using ORDER BY> with mixed
ASC>/DESC> specifiers could not fully use
an index. Now an index can be fully used in such cases if the
index was created with matching
ASC>/DESC> specifications.
NULL> sort order within an index can be controlled, too.
Allow col IS NULL> to use an index (Teodor)
Updatable cursors (Arul Shaji, Tom)
This eliminates the need to reference a primary key to
UPDATE> or DELETE> rows returned by a cursor.
The syntax is UPDATE/DELETE WHERE CURRENT OF>.
Allow FOR UPDATE in cursors (Arul Shaji, Tom)
Create a general mechanism that supports casts to and from the
standard string types (TEXT, VARCHAR,
CHAR) for every datatype, by
invoking the datatype's I/O functions (Tom)
Previously, such casts were available only for types that had
specialized function(s) for the purpose.
These new casts are assignment-only in the to-string direction,
explicit-only in the other direction, and therefore should create no
surprising behavior.
Allow UNION> and related constructs to return a domain
type, when all inputs are of that domain type (Tom)
Formerly, the output would be considered to be of the domain's base
type.
Allow limited hashing when using two different data types (Tom)
This allows hash joins, hash indexes, hashed subplans, and hash
aggregation to be used in situations involving cross-data-type
comparisons, if the data types have compatible hash functions.
Currently, cross-data-type hashing support exists for
smallint/integer/bigint,
and for float4/float8.
Improve optimizer logic for detecting when variables are equal
in a WHERE> clause (Tom)
This allows mergejoins to work with descending sort orders, and
improves recognition of redundant sort columns.
Improve performance when planning large inheritance trees in
cases where most tables are excluded by constraints (Tom)
Object Manipulation
Arrays of composite types (David Fetter, Andrew, Tom)
In addition to arrays of explicitly-declared composite types,
arrays of the rowtypes of regular tables and views are now
supported, except for rowtypes of system catalogs, sequences, and TOAST
tables.
Server configuration parameters can now be set on a per-function
basis (Tom)
For example, functions can now set their own
search_path> to prevent unexpected behavior if a
different search_path> exists at run-time. Security
definer functions should set search_path to
avoid security loopholes.
CREATE/ALTER FUNCTION now supports
COST and ROWS options (Tom)
COST allows specification of the cost of a
function call. ROWS allows specification of
the average number or rows returned by a set-returning function.
These values are used by the optimizer in choosing the best plan.
Implement CREATE TABLE LIKE ... INCLUDING
INDEXES (Trevor Hardcastle, Nikhil Sontakke, Neil)
Allow CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY to ignore
transactions in other databases (Simon)
Add ALTER VIEW ... RENAME TO and ALTER
SEQUENCE ... RENAME TO (David Fetter, Neil)
Previously this could only be done via ALTER TABLE ...
RENAME TO.
Make CREATE/DROP/RENAME DATABASE> wait briefly for
conflicting backends to exit before failing (Tom)
This increases the likelihood that these commands will succeed.
Allow triggers and rules to be deactivated in groups using a
configuration parameter, for replication purposes (Jan)
This allows replication systems to disable triggers and rewrite
rules as a group without modifying the system catalogs directly.
The behavior is controlled by ALTER TABLE> and a new
parameter session_replication_role.
User-defined types can now have type modifiers (Teodor, Tom)
This allows a user-defined type to take a modifier, like
ssnum(7)>. Previously only built-in
data types could have modifiers.
Utility Commands
Non-superuser database owners now are able to add trusted procedural
languages to their databases by default (Jeremy Drake)
While this is reasonably safe, some administrators might wish to
revoke the privilege. It is controlled by
pg_pltemplate>.tmpldbacreate>.
Allow a session's current parameter setting to be used as the
default for future sessions (Tom)
This is done with SET ... FROM CURRENT in
CREATE/ALTER FUNCTION, ALTER
DATABASE, or ALTER ROLE.
Implement new commands DISCARD ALL,
DISCARD PLANS, DISCARD
TEMPORARY, CLOSE ALL, and
DEALLOCATE ALL (Marko Kreen, Neil)
These commands simplify resetting a database session to its initial
state, and are particularly useful for connection-pooling software.
Make CLUSTER MVCC-safe (Heikki Linnakangas)
Formerly, CLUSTER would discard all tuples
that were committed dead, even if there were still transactions
that should be able to see them under MVCC visibility rules.
Add new CLUSTER syntax: CLUSTER
table> USING index>
(Holger Schurig)
The old CLUSTER syntax is still supported, but
the new form is considered more logical.
Fix EXPLAIN so it can show complex plans
more accurately (Tom)
References to subplan outputs are now always shown correctly,
instead of using ?columnN>?
for complicated cases.
Limit the amount of information reported when a user is dropped
(Alvaro)
Previously, dropping (or attempting to drop) a user who owned many
objects could result in large NOTICE or
ERROR messages listing all these objects; this
caused problems for some client applications. The length of the
message is now limited, although a full list is still sent to the
server log.
Data Types
Support for the SQL/XML standard, including new operators and an
XML data type (Nikolay Samokhvalov, Pavel Stehule, Peter)
Enumerated data types (ENUM) (Tom Dunstan)
This feature provides convenient support for fields that have a
small, fixed set of allowed values. An example of creating an
ENUM> type is
CREATE TYPE mood AS ENUM ('sad', 'ok', 'happy')>.
Universally Unique Identifier (UUID>) data type (Gevik
Babakhani, Neil)
This closely matches RFC> 4122.
Widen the MONEY data type to 64 bits (D'Arcy Cain)
This greatly increases the range of supported MONEY>
values.
Fix float4/float8 to handle
Infinity> and NAN> (Not A Number)
consistently (Bruce)
The code formerly was not consistent about distinguishing
Infinity> from overflow conditions.
Allow leading and trailing whitespace during input of
boolean values (Neil)
Prevent COPY> from using digits and lowercase letters as
delimiters (Tom)
Functions
Add new regular expression functions
regexp_matches(),
regexp_split_to_array(), and
regexp_split_to_table() (Jeremy Drake, Neil)
These functions provide extraction of regular expression
subexpressions and allow splitting a string using a POSIX regular
expression.
Add lo_truncate() for large object truncation
(Kris Jurka)
Implement width_bucket() for the float8>
data type (Neil)
Add pg_stat_clear_snapshot() to discard
statistics snapshots collected during the current transaction
(Tom)
The first request for statistics in a transaction takes a statistics
snapshot that does not change during the transaction. This function
allows the snapshot to be discarded and a new snapshot loaded during
the next statistics query. This is particularly useful for PL/PgSQL
functions, which are confined to a single transaction.
Add isodow> option to EXTRACT()> and
date_part()> (Bruce)
This returns the day of the week, with Sunday as seven.
(dow> returns Sunday as zero.)
Add ID> (ISO day of week) and IDDD> (ISO
day of year) format codes for to_char()>,
to_date()>, and to_timestamp()> (Brendan
Jurd)
Make to_timestamp()> and to_date()>
assume TM (trim) option for potentially
variable-width fields (Bruce)
This matches Oracle>'s behavior.
Fix off-by-one conversion error in
to_date()/to_timestamp()D> (non-ISO day of week) fields (Bruce)
Make setseed() return void, rather than a
useless integer value (Neil)
Add a hash function for NUMERIC (Neil)
This allows hash indexes and hash-based plans to be used with
NUMERIC columns.
Improve efficiency of
LIKE/ILIKE, especially for
multi-byte character sets like UTF-8 (Andrew, Itagaki Takahiro)
Make currtid() functions require
SELECT privileges on the target table (Tom)
Add several txid_*() functions to query
active transaction IDs (Jan)
This is useful for various replication solutions.
PL/PgSQL Server-Side Language
Add scrollable cursor support, including directional control in
FETCH (Pavel Stehule)
Allow IN as an alternative to
FROM in PL/PgSQL's FETCH
statement, for consistency with the backend's
FETCH command (Pavel Stehule)
Add MOVE to PL/PgSQL (Magnus, Pavel Stehule,
Neil)
Implement RETURN QUERY (Pavel Stehule, Neil)
This adds convenient syntax for PL/PgSQL set-returning functions
that want to return the result of a query. RETURN QUERY>
is easier and more efficient than a loop
around RETURN NEXT.
Allow function parameter names to be qualified with the
function's name (Tom)
For example, myfunc.myvar>. This is particularly
useful for specifying variables in a query where the variable
name might match a column name.
Make qualification of variables with block labels work properly (Tom)
Formerly, outer-level block labels could unexpectedly interfere with
recognition of inner-level record or row references.
Tighten requirements for FOR loop
STEP> values (Tom)
Prevent non-positive STEP> values, and handle
loop overflows.
Improve accuracy when reporting syntax error locations (Tom)
Other Server-Side Languages
Allow type-name arguments to PL/Perl
spi_prepare() to be data type aliases in
addition to names found in pg_type (Andrew)
Allow type-name arguments to PL/Python
plpy.prepare() to be data type aliases in
addition to names found in pg_type (Andrew)
Allow type-name arguments to PL/Tcl spi_prepare> to
be data type aliases in addition to names found in
pg_type (Andrew)
Enable PL/PythonU to compile on Python 2.5 (Marko Kreen)
Support a true PL/Python boolean type in compatible Python versions
(Python 2.3 and later) (Marko Kreen)
Fix PL/Tcl problems with thread-enabled libtcl> spawning
multiple threads within the backend (Steve Marshall, Paul Bayer,
Doug Knight)
This caused all sorts of unpleasantness.
psql>
List disabled triggers separately in \d output
(Brendan Jurd)
In \d patterns, always match $
literally (Tom)
Show aggregate return types in \da output
(Greg Sabino Mullane)
Add the function's volatility status to the output of
\df+ (Neil)
Add \prompt capability (Chad Wagner)
Allow \pset, \t, and
\x to specify on> or off>,
rather than just toggling (Chad Wagner)
Add \sleep> capability (Jan)
Enable \timing> output for \copy> (Andrew)
Improve \timing resolution on Windows
(Itagaki Takahiro)
Flush \o> output after each backslash command (Tom)
Correctly detect and report errors while reading a -f>
input file (Peter)
Remove -u> option (this option has long been deprecated)
(Tom)
pg_dump>
Add --tablespaces-only> and --roles-only>
options to pg_dumpall (Dave Page)
Add an output file option to
pg_dumpall (Dave Page)
This is primarily useful on Windows, where output redirection of
child pg_dump processes does not work.
Allow pg_dumpall> to accept an initial-connection
database name rather than the default
template1 (Dave Page)
In -n> and -t> switches, always match
$ literally (Tom)
Improve performance when a database has thousands of objects (Tom)
Remove -u> option (this option has long been deprecated)
(Tom)
Other Client Applications
In initdb>, allow the location of the
pg_xlog directory to be specified
(Euler Taveira de Oliveira)
Enable server core dump generation in pg_regress>
on supported operating systems (Andrew)
Add a -t> (timeout) parameter to pg_ctl>
(Bruce)
This controls how long pg_ctl> will wait when waiting
for server startup or shutdown. Formerly the timeout was hard-wired
as 60 seconds.
Add a pg_ctl> option to control generation
of server core dumps (Andrew)
Allow Control-C to cancel clusterdb>,
reindexdb>, and vacuumdb> (Itagaki
Takahiro, Magnus)
Suppress command tag output for createdb>,
createuser>, dropdb>, and
dropuser> (Peter)
The --quiet> option is ignored and will be removed in 8.4.
Progress messages when acting on all databases now go to stdout
instead of stderr because they are not actually errors.
libpq>
Interpret the dbName> parameter of
PQsetdbLogin()> as a conninfo> string if
it contains an equals sign (Andrew)
This allows use of conninfo> strings in client
programs that still use PQsetdbLogin()>.
Support a global SSL> configuration file (Victor
Wagner)
Add environment variable PGSSLKEY> to control
SSL> hardware keys (Victor Wagner)
Add lo_truncate() for large object
truncation (Kris Jurka)
Add PQconnectionNeedsPassword() that returns
true if the server required a password but none was supplied
(Joe Conway, Tom)
If this returns true after a failed connection attempt, a client
application should prompt the user for a password. In the past
applications have had to check for a specific error message string to
decide whether a password is needed; that approach is now
deprecated.
Add PQconnectionUsedPassword() that returns
true if the supplied password was actually used
(Joe Conway, Tom)
This is useful in some security contexts where it is important
to know whether a user-supplied password is actually valid.
ecpg>
Use V3 frontend/backend protocol (Michael)
This adds support for server-side prepared statements.
Use native threads, instead of pthreads, on Windows (Magnus)
Improve thread-safety of ecpglib (Itagaki Takahiro)
Make the ecpg libraries export only necessary API symbols (Michael)
Windows> Port
Allow the whole PostgreSQL> distribution to be compiled
with Microsoft Visual C++> (Magnus and others)
This allows Windows-based developers to use familiar development
and debugging tools.
Windows executables made with Visual C++ might also have better
stability and performance than those made with other tool sets.
The client-only Visual C++ build scripts have been removed.
Drastically reduce postmaster's memory usage when it has many child
processes (Magnus)
Allow regression tests to be started by an administrative
user (Magnus)
Add native shared memory implementation (Magnus)
Server Programming Interface (SPI>)
Add cursor-related functionality in SPI (Pavel Stehule)
Allow access to the cursor-related planning options, and add
FETCH>/MOVE> routines.
Allow execution of cursor commands through
SPI_execute (Tom)
The macro SPI_ERROR_CURSOR> still exists but will
never be returned.
SPI plan pointers are now declared as SPIPlanPtr> instead of
void *> (Tom)
This does not break application code, but switching is
recommended to help catch simple programming mistakes.
Build Options
Add configure> option --enable-profiling>
to enable code profiling (works only with gcc>)
(Korry Douglas and Nikhil Sontakke)
Add configure> option --with-system-tzdata>
to use the operating system's time zone database (Peter)
Fix PGXS> so extensions can be built against PostgreSQL
installations whose pg_config> program does not
appear first in the PATH> (Tom)
Support gmake draft when building the
SGML> documentation (Bruce)
Unless draft> is used, the documentation build will
now be repeated if necessary to ensure the index is up-to-date.
Source Code
Rename macro DLLIMPORT> to PGDLLIMPORT> to
avoid conflicting with third party includes (like Tcl) that
define DLLIMPORT> (Magnus)
Create operator families to improve planning of
queries involving cross-data-type comparisons (Tom)
Update GIN extractQuery()> API to allow signalling
that nothing can satisfy the query (Teodor)
Move NAMEDATALEN> definition from
postgres_ext.h> to pg_config_manual.h>
(Peter)
Provide strlcpy() and
strlcat() on all platforms, and replace
error-prone uses of strncpy(),
strncat(), etc (Peter)
Create hooks to let an external plugin monitor (or even replace) the
planner and create plans for hypothetical situations (Gurjeet
Singh, Tom)
Create a function variable join_search_hook> to let plugins
override the join search order portion of the planner (Julius
Stroffek)
Add tas()> support for Renesas' M32R processor
(Kazuhiro Inaoka)
quote_identifier() and
pg_dump no longer quote keywords that are
unreserved according to the grammar (Tom)
Change the on-disk representation of the NUMERIC
data type so that the sign_dscale> word comes
before the weight (Tom)
Use SYSV> semaphores rather than POSIX on Darwin
>= 6.0, i.e., OS X 10.2 and up (Chris Marcellino)
Add acronym and NFS documentation
sections (Bruce)
"Postgres" is now documented as an accepted alias for
"PostgreSQL" (Peter)
Add documentation about preventing database server spoofing when
the server is down (Bruce)
Contrib
Move contrib> README> content into the
main PostgreSQL> documentation (Albert Cervera i
Areny)
Add contrib/pageinspect module for low-level
page inspection (Simon, Heikki)
Add contrib/pg_standby module for controlling
warm standby operation (Simon)
Add contrib/uuid-ossp module for generating
UUID> values using the OSSP UUID library (Peter)
Use configure>
--with-ossp-uuid to activate. This takes
advantage of the new UUID builtin type.
Add contrib/dict_int,
contrib/dict_xsyn, and
contrib/test_parser modules to provide
sample add-on text search dictionary templates and parsers
(Sergey Karpov)
Allow contrib/pgbench> to set the fillfactor (Pavan
Deolasee)
Add timestamps to contrib/pgbench> -l>
(Greg Smith)
Add usage count statistics to
contrib/pgbuffercache (Greg Smith)
Add GIN support for contrib/hstore> (Teodor)
Add GIN support for contrib/pg_trgm> (Guillaume Smet, Teodor)
Update OS/X startup scripts in
contrib/start-scripts (Mark Cotner, David
Fetter)
Restrict pgrowlocks() and
dblink_get_pkey() to users who have
SELECT privilege on the target table (Tom)
Restrict contrib/pgstattuple functions to
superusers (Tom)
contrib/xml2 is deprecated and planned for
removal in 8.4 (Peter)
The new XML support in core PostgreSQL supersedes this module.