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)
* 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)
* Fix bugs in information_schema.referential_constraints view
* Correct collations for citext columns and indexes
* Prevent possible crash when joining to a scalar function
* Prevent transitory data corruption of GIN indexes after a crash
* Prevent data corruption on TOAST columns when copying data
* Fix failures during hot standby startup
* Correct another "variable not found in subplan target list" bug
* Fix bug with sorting on aggregate expressions in windowing functions
* Multiple bug fixes for pg_upgrade
* Change Foreign Key creation order to better support self-referential keys
* Multiple bug fixes to CREATE EXTENSION
* Ensure that function return type and data returned from PL/perl agree
* Ensure that PL/perl strings are always UTF-8
* Assorted bug fixes for various Extensions
* Updates to the time zone database, particularly to CST6
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
