This release primarily fixes issues not successfully fixed in prior releases. It should be applied as soon as possible all users of major versions 9.3 and 9.4. Other users should apply at the next available downtime.
Crash Recovery Fixes:
Earlier update releases attempted to fix an issue in PostgreSQL 9.3 and 9.4 with "multixact wraparound", but failed to account for issues doing multixact cleanup during crash recovery. This could cause servers to be unable to restart after a crash. As such, all users of 9.3 and 9.4 should apply this update as soon as possible.
Do it for all packages that
* mention perl, or
* have a directory name starting with p5-*, or
* depend on a package starting with p5-
like last time, for 5.18, where this didn't lead to complaints.
Let me know if you have any this time.
Guarantee transmission of all WAL files before replica failover
Prevent downcasing of non-ASCII identifiers
Fix several minor memory leaks
Correct overcommit behavior when using more than 24GB of work memory
Improve planner cost estimates for choosing generic plans
Fix estimates of NULL rows in boolean columns
Make UNION ALL and inheritance query plans recheck parameterized paths
Correct pg_dump bugs for foreign tables, views, and extensions
Prevent a parallel pg_restore failure on certain indexes
Make REINDEX revalidate constraints
Prevent two deadlock issues in SP-GIST and REINDEX CONCURRENTLY
Prevent GiST index lookup crash
Fix several regular expression failures
Allow ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES to work on all schemas
Loosen restrictions on keywords
Allow various spellings of infinity
Expand ability to compare rows to records and arrays
Prevent psql client crash on bad PSQLRC file
Add spinlock support for ARM64
a) refer 'perl' in their Makefile, or
b) have a directory name of p5-*, or
c) have any dependency on any p5-* package
Like last time, where this caused no complaints.
The security issue fixed in this release, CVE-2013-0255, allows a previously authenticated user to crash the server by calling an internal function with invalid arguments. This issue was discovered by independent security researcher Sumit Soni this week and reported via Secunia SVCRP, and we are grateful for their efforts in making PostgreSQL more secure.
Today's update also fixes a performance regression which caused a decrease in throughput when using dynamic queries in stored procedures in version 9.2. Applications which use PL/pgSQL's EXECUTE are strongly affected by this regression and should be updated. Additionally, we have fixed intermittent crashes caused by CREATE/DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY, and multiple minor issues with replication.
This release is expected to be the final update for version 8.3, which is now End-of-Life (EOL). Users of version 8.3 should plan to upgrade to a later version of PostgreSQL immediately. For more information, see our Versioning Policy.
This update release also contains fixes for many minor issues discovered and patched by the PostgreSQL community in the last two months, including:
* Prevent unnecessary table scans during vacuuming
* Prevent spurious cached plan error in PL/pgSQL
* Allow sub-SELECTs to be subscripted
* Prevent DROP OWNED from dropping databases or tablespaces
* Make ECPG use translated messages
* Allow PL/Python to use multi-table trigger functions (again) in 9.1 and 9.2
* Fix several activity log management issues on Windows
* Prevent autovacuum file truncation from being cancelled by deadlock_timeout
* Make extensions build with the .exe suffix automatically on Windows
* Fix concurrency issues with CREATE/DROP DATABASE
* Reject out-of-range values in to_date() conversion function
* Revert cost estimation for large indexes back to pre-9.2 behavior
* Make pg_basebackup tolerate timeline switches
* Cleanup leftover temp table entries during crash recovery
* Prevent infinite loop when COPY inserts a large tuple into a table with a large fillfactor
* Prevent integer overflow in dynahash creation
* Make pg_upgrade work with INVALID indexes
* Fix bugs in TYPE privileges
* Allow Contrib installchecks to run in their own databases
* Many documentation updates
* Add new timezone "FET".
PostgreSQL 9.2 will ship with native JSON support, covering indexes, replication and performance improvements, and many more features. We are eagerly awaiting this release and will make it available in Early Access as soon as it’s released by the PostgreSQL community," said Ines Sombra, Lead Data Engineer, Engine Yard.
