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".
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)
* 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 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)
* 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 WAL replay logic for GIN indexes to not fail if the index was
subsequently dropped (Tom Lane)
* 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)
* 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
*bjects (Jeff Janes, Tom Lane)
* 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
*bjects (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 build issues on HP-UX and Itanium
* update time zone files for recent time zone changes
* change SQLSTATE for Hot Standby warnings
* prevent bgwriter hang during recovery
* prevent recursive composite type creation
* disallow dropping tables whose triggers are still pending
* allow use of "replication" as a user name
* prevent a crash during GEQO planning
* improve join plans for tables with missing statistics
* fix error with SELECT FOR UPDATE in a subselect
* close PL/python array slice memory leak
* allow SSL connections for users with no home directory
* allow building PostgreSQL 9.0 with 64-bit MinGW
