PostgreSQL 12.2, 11.7, 10.12, 9.6.17, 9.5.21, and 9.4.26
PostgreSQL 9.4 Now EOL
This is the last release for PostgreSQL 9.4, which will no longer receive security updates and bug fixes. PostgreSQL 9.4 introduced new features such as JSONB support, the ALTER SYSTEM command, the ability to stream logical changes to an output plugin, and more.
While we are very proud of this release, these features are also found in newer versions of PostgreSQL. Many of these features have also received improvements, and, per our versioning policy, it is time to retire PostgreSQL 9.4.
To receive continued support, we suggest that you make plans to upgrade to a newer, supported version of PostgreSQL. Please see the PostgreSQL versioning policy for more information.
Security Issues
CVE-2020-1720: ALTER ... DEPENDS ON EXTENSION is missing authorization checks.
Versions Affected: 9.6 - 12
The ALTER ... DEPENDS ON EXTENSION sub-commands do not perform authorization checks, which can allow an unprivileged user to drop any function, procedure, materialized view, index, or trigger under certain conditions. This attack is possible if an administrator has installed an extension and an unprivileged user can CREATE, or an extension owner either executes DROP EXTENSION predictably or can be convinced to execute DROP EXTENSION.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
This update also fixes over 75 bugs that were reported in the last several months. Some of these issues affect only version 12, but may also affect all supported versions.
Some of these fixes include:
Fix for partitioned tables with foreign-key references where TRUNCATE ... CASCADE would not remove all data. If you have previously used TRUNCATE ... CASCADE on a partitioned table with foreign-key references please see the "Updating" section for verification and cleanup steps.
Fix failure to add foreign key constraints to table with sub-partitions (aka a multi-level partitioned table). If you have previously used this functionality, you can fix it by either detaching and re-attaching the affected partition, or by dropping and re-adding the foreign key constraint to the parent table. You can find more information on how to perform these steps in the ALTER TABLE documentation.
Fix performance issue for partitioned tables introduced by the fix for CVE-2017-7484 that now allows the planner to use statistics on a child table for a column that the user is granted access to on the parent table when the query contains a leaky operator.
Several other fixes and changes for partitioned tables, including disallowing partition key expressions that return pseudo-types, such as RECORD.
Fix for logical replication subscribers for executing per-column UPDATE triggers.
Fix for several crashes and failures for logical replication subscribers and publishers.
Improve efficiency of logical replication with REPLICA IDENTITY FULL.
Ensure that calling pg_replication_slot_advance() on a physical replication slot will persist changes across restarts.
Several fixes for the walsender processes.
Improve performance of hash joins with very large inner relations.
Fix placement of "Subplans Removed" field in EXPLAIN output by placing it with its parent Append or MergeAppend plan.
Several fixes for parallel query plans.
Several fixes for query planner errors, including one that affected joins to single-row subqueries.
Several fixes for MCV extend statistics, including one for incorrect estimation for OR clauses.
Improve efficiency of parallel hash join on CPUs with many cores.
Ignore the CONCURRENTLY option when performing an index creation, drop, or reindex on a temporary table.
Fall back to non-parallel index builds when a parallelized CREATE INDEX has no free dynamic shared memory slots.
Several fixes for GiST & GIN indexes.
Fix possible crash in BRIN index operations with box, range and inet data types.
Fix support for BRIN hypothetical indexes.
Fix failure in ALTER TABLE when a column referenced in a GENERATED expression is added or changed in type earlier in the same ALTER TABLE statement.
Fix handling of multiple AFTER ROW triggers on a foreign table.
Fix off-by-one result for EXTRACT(ISOYEAR FROM timestamp) for BC dates.
Prevent unwanted lowercasing and truncation of RADIUS authentication parameters in the pg_hba.conf file.
Several fixes for GSSAPI support, including having libpq accept all GSS-related connection parameters even if the GSSAPI code is not compiled in.
Several fixes for pg_dump and pg_restore when run in parallel mode.
Fix crash with postgres_fdw when trying to execute a remote query on the remote server such as UPDATE remote_tab SET (x,y) = (SELECT ...).
Disallow NULL category values in the crosstab() function of contrib/tablefunc to prevent crashes.
Several fixes for Windows, including a race condition that could cause timing oddities with NOTIFY.
Several ecpg fixes.
PostgreSQL 12.1, 11.6, 10.11, 9.6.16, 9.5.20, and 9.4.25 Released!
PostgreSQL 9.4 EOL Approaching
PostgreSQL 9.4 will stop receiving fixes on February 13, 2020, which is the next planned cumulative update release. Please see our versioning policy for more information.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
This update also fixes over 50 bugs that were reported in the last several months. Some of these issues affect only version 12, but may also affect all supported versions.
Some of these fixes include:
Fix crash that occurs when ALTER TABLE adds a column without a default value along with other changes that require a table rewrite
Several fixes for REINDEX CONCURRENTLY.
Fix for VACUUM that would cause it to fail under a specific case involving a still-running transaction.
Fix for a memory leak that could occur when VACUUM runs on a GiST index.
Fix for an error that occurred when running CLUSTER on an expression index.
Fix failure for SET CONSTRAINTS ... DEFERRED on partitioned tables.
Several fixes for the creation and dropping of indexes on partitioned tables.
Fix for partition-wise joins that could lead to planner failures.
Ensure that offset expressions in WINDOW clauses are processed when a query's expressions are manipulated.
Fix misbehavior of bitshiftright() where it failed to zero out padding space in the last byte if the bit string length is not a multiple of 8. For how to correct your data, please see the "Updating" section.
Ensure an empty string that is evaluated by the position() functions returns 1, as per the SQL standard.
Fix for a parallel query failure when it is unable to request a background worker.
Fix crash triggered by a case involving a BEFORE UPDATE trigger.
Display the correct error when a query tries to access a TOAST table.
Allow encoding conversion to succeed on strings with output up to 1GB. Previously there was hard limit of 0.25GB on the input string.
Ensure that temporary WAL and history files are removed at the end of archive recovery.
Avoid failure in archive recovery if recovery_min_apply_delay is enabled.
Ignore restore_command, recovery_end_command, and recovery_min_apply_delay settings during crash recovery.
Several fixes for logical replication, including a failure when the publisher and subscriber had different REPLICA IDENTITY columns set.
Correctly timestamp replication messages for logical decoding, which in the broken case would lead to pg_stat_subscription.last_msg_send_time set to NULL.
Several fixes for libpq, including one that improves PostgreSQL 12 compatibility.
Several pg_upgrade fixes.
Fix how a parallel restore handles foreign key constraints on partitioned tables to ensure they are not created too soon.
pg_dump now outputs similarly named triggers and RLS policies in order based on table name, instead of OID.
Fix pg_rewind to not update the contents of pg_control when using the --dry-run option.
This update also contains tzdata release 2019c for DST law changes in Fiji and Norfolk Island. Historical corrections for Alberta, Austria, Belgium, British Columbia, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indiana (Perry County), Kaliningrad, Kentucky, Michigan, Norfolk Island, South Korea, and Turkey.
Release 12:
General performance improvements, including:
* Optimizations to space utilization and read/write performance for B-tree indexes
* Partitioning performance enhancements, including improved query performance on tables with thousands of partitions, improved insertion performance with INSERT and COPY, and the ability to execute ALTER TABLE ATTACH PARTITION without blocking queries
* Automatic (but overridable) inlining of common table expressions (CTEs)
* Reduction of WAL overhead for creation of GiST, GIN, and SP-GiST indexes
* Support for covering GiST indexes, via the INCLUDE clause
* Multi-column most-common-value (MCV) statistics can be defined via CREATE STATISTICS, to support better plans for queries that test several non-uniformly-distributed columns
Enhancements to administrative functionality, including:
* REINDEX CONCURRENTLY can rebuild an index without blocking writes to its table
* pg_checksums can enable/disable page checksums (used for detecting data corruption) in an offline cluster
* Progress reporting statistics for CREATE INDEX, REINDEX, CLUSTER, VACUUM FULL, and pg_checksums
Support for the SQL/JSON path language
Stored generated columns
Nondeterministic ICU collations, enabling case-insensitive and accent-insensitive grouping and ordering
New authentication features, including:
* Encryption of TCP/IP connections when using GSSAPI authentication
* Discovery of LDAP servers using DNS SRV records
* Multi-factor authentication, using the clientcert=verify-full option combined with an additional authentication method in pg_hba.conf
