The update fixes two potential data corruption issues present in the PostgreSQL 9.1 and 9.2 for any server which has crashed, been shutdown with "immediate", or was failed over to a standby. First, the PostgreSQL development team has discovered a chance of corruption of BTREE and GIN indexes for databases. Second, there is a significant chance of corruption of the visibility map. This update fixes both issues.
We strongly advise users of 9.1 and 9.2 to run VACUUM and/or index rebuilds after applying the update. Please see the 2012-09-24 Update wiki page for detailed instructions.
This update release also contains fixes for many minor issues discovered and patched by the PostgreSQL community in the last month, including many fixes for the newly released version 9.2. These include:
fix sorting issue with IN lists and indexes
fix planner failure when combining GROUP BY with window functions
improve selectivity of text searches using prefixes
prevent rescanning of WITH clauses from giving wrong answers
fix PL/Perl crashing issue
reduce bloat for multi-column GiST indexes
time zone data changes for Fiji
disallow Extensions from circular schema assignment
prevent crashes when default_transaction_isolation is set to "serializable"
several minor fixes to pg_upgrade
Changes:
* Fix incorrect password transformation in contrib/pgcrypto's DES crypt()
function (Solar Designer)
* Ignore SECURITY DEFINER and SET attributes for a procedural language's call
handler (Tom Lane)
* Make contrib/citext's upgrade script fix collations of citext arrays and
domains over citext (Tom Lane)
* Allow numeric timezone offsets in timestamp input to be up to 16 hours away
from UTC (Tom Lane)
* Fix timestamp conversion to cope when the given time is exactly the last DST
transition time for the current timezone (Tom Lane)
* Fix text to name and char to name casts to perform string truncation
correctly in multibyte encodings (Karl Schnaitter)
* Fix memory copying bug in to_tsquery() (Heikki Linnakangas)
* Ensure txid_current() reports the correct epoch when executed in hot standby
(Simon Riggs)
* Fix planner's handling of outer PlaceHolderVars within subqueries (Tom Lane)
* Fix planning of UNION ALL subqueries with output columns that are not simple
variables (Tom Lane)
* Fix slow session startup when pg_attribute is very large (Tom Lane)
* Ensure sequential scans check for query cancel reasonably often (Merlin
Moncure)
* Ensure the Windows implementation of PGSemaphoreLock() clears
ImmediateInterruptOK before returning (Tom Lane)
* Show whole-row variables safely when printing views or rules (Abbas Butt, Tom
Lane)
* Fix COPY FROM to properly handle null marker strings that correspond to
invalid encoding (Tom Lane)
* Fix EXPLAIN VERBOSE for writable CTEs containing RETURNING clauses (Tom Lane)
* Fix PREPARE TRANSACTION to work correctly in the presence of advisory locks
(Tom Lane)
* Fix truncation of unlogged tables (Robert Haas)
* Ignore missing schemas during non-interactive assignments of search_path (Tom
Lane)
* Fix bugs with temporary or transient tables used in extension scripts (Tom
Lane)
* Ensure autovacuum worker processes perform stack depth checking properly
(Heikki Linnakangas)
* Fix logging collector to not lose log coherency under high load (Andrew
Dunstan)
* Fix logging collector to ensure it will restart file rotation after receiving
SIGHUP (Tom Lane)
* Fix "too many LWLocks taken" failure in GiST indexes (Heikki Linnakangas)
* Fix WAL replay logic for GIN indexes to not fail if the index was
subsequently dropped (Tom Lane)
* Correctly detect SSI conflicts of prepared transactions after a crash (Dan
Ports)
* Avoid synchronous replication delay when committing a transaction that only
modified temporary tables (Heikki Linnakangas)
* Fix error handling in pg_basebackup (Thomas Ogrisegg, Fujii Masao)
* Fix walsender to not go into a busy loop if connection is terminated (Fujii
Masao)
* Fix memory leak in PL/pgSQL's RETURN NEXT command (Joe Conway)
* Fix PL/pgSQL's GET DIAGNOSTICS command when the target is the function's
first variable (Tom Lane)
* Ensure that PL/Perl package-qualifies the _TD variable (Alex Hunsaker)
* Fix PL/Python functions returning composite types to accept a string for
their result value (Jan Urbanski)
* Fix potential access off the end of memory in psql's expanded display (\x)
mode (Peter Eisentraut)
* Fix several performance problems in pg_dump when the database contains many
objects (Jeff Janes, Tom Lane)
* Fix memory and file descriptor leaks in pg_restore when reading a
directory-format archive (Peter Eisentraut)
* Fix pg_upgrade for the case that a database stored in a non-default
tablespace contains a table in the cluster's default tablespace (Bruce Momjian)
* In ecpg, fix rare memory leaks and possible overwrite of one byte after the
sqlca_t structure (Peter Eisentraut)
* Fix contrib/dblink's dblink_exec() to not leak temporary database connections
upon error (Tom Lane)
* Fix contrib/dblink to report the correct connection name in error messages
(Kyotaro Horiguchi)
* Fix contrib/vacuumlo to use multiple transactions when dropping many large
objects (Tim Lewis, Robert Haas, Tom Lane)
* Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2012c for DST law changes in
Antarctica, Armenia, Chile, Cuba, Falkland Islands, Gaza, Haiti, Hebron,
Morocco, Syria, and Tokelau Islands;
* Fix btree index corruption from insertions concurrent with vacuuming
* Recover from errors occurring during WAL replay of DROP TABLESPACE
* Fix transient zeroing of shared buffers during WAL replay
* Fix postmaster to attempt restart after a hot-standby crash
* Fix corner case in SSI transaction cleanup
* Update per-column permissions, not only per-table permissions, when changing
table owner
* Fix handling of data-modifying WITH subplans in READ COMMITTED rechecking
* Fix for "could not find plan for CTE" failures
* Fix unsupported node type error caused by COLLATE in an INSERT expression
* Avoid crashing when we have problems deleting table files post-commit
* Fix recently-introduced memory leak in processing of inet/cidr
* Fix GIN cost estimation to handle column IN (...) index conditions
* Fix I/O-conversion-related memory leaks in plpgsql
* Teach pg_upgrade to handle renaming of plpython's shared library (affecting
upgrades to 9.1)
years, removing roadblocks to deploying new or ported applications on
PostgreSQL. These include:
* Synchronous Replication: enable high-availability with consistency across
multiple servers
* Per-Column Collations: support linguistically-correct sorting per database,
table or column.
* Unlogged Tables: greatly improves performance for ephemeral data
Our community of contributors innovates with cutting-edge features. Version 9.1
includes several which are new to the database industry, such as:
* K-Nearest-Neighbor Indexing: index on "distance" for faster location and text
search queries
* Serializable Snapshot Isolation: keeps concurrent transactions consistent
without blocking, using "true serializability"
* Writeable Common Table Expressions: execute complex multi-stage data updates
in a single query
* Security-Enhanced Postgres: deploy military-grade security and Mandatory
Access Control
