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;
* Before exiting walreceiver, ensure all the received WAL is fsync'd to disk
* Avoid excess fsync activity in walreceiver
* Make "ALTER TABLE" revalidate uniqueness and exclusion constraints when needed
* Fix EvalPlanQual for "UPDATE" of an inheritance tree in which the tables are
not all alike
* Avoid failures when "EXPLAIN" tries to display a simple-form CASE expression
* Fix assignment to an array slice that is before the existing range of
subscripts
* Avoid unexpected conversion overflow in planner for very distant date values
* Fix PL/Python crash when an array contains null entries
* Remove ecpg's fixed length limit for constants defining an array dimension
* Fix erroneous parsing of tsquery values containing ... &
!(subexpression) | ...
* Fix buffer overrun in "contrib/intarray"'s input function for the query_int
type
* Fix bug in "contrib/seg"'s GiST picksplit algorithm
* Force the default wal_sync_method to be fdatasync on Linux
* Fix "too many KnownAssignedXids" error during Hot Standby replay
* Fix race condition in lock acquisition during Hot Standby
* Avoid unnecessary conflicts during Hot Standby
* Fix assorted bugs in WAL replay logic for GIN indexes
* Fix recovery from base backup when the starting checkpoint WAL
record is not in the same WAL segment as its redo point
* Fix corner-case bug when streaming replication is enabled
immediately after creating the master database cluster
* Fix persistent slowdown of autovacuum workers when multiple workers
remain active for a long time
* Fix long-term memory leak in autovacuum launcher
* Avoid failure when trying to report an impending transaction
wraparound condition from outside a transaction
* Add support for detecting register-stack overrun on IA64
* Add a check for stack overflow in copyObject()
* Fix detection of page splits in temporary GiST indexes
* Fix error checking during early connection processing
* Improve efficiency of window functions
* Avoid memory leakage while "ANALYZE"'ing complex index expressions
* Ensure an index that uses a whole-row Var still depends on its table
* Add missing support in "DROP OWNED BY" for removing foreign data
wrapper/server privileges belonging to a user
* Do not "inline" a SQL function with multiple OUT parameters
* Fix crash when inline-ing a set-returning function whose argument
list contains a reference to an inline-able user function
* Behave correctly if ORDER BY, LIMIT, FOR UPDATE, or WITH is
attached to the VALUES part of INSERT ... VALUES
* Make the OFF keyword unreserved
This prevents problems with using off as a variable name in
PL/pgSQL. That worked before 9.0, but was now broken because
PL/pgSQL now treats all core reserved words as reserved.
* Fix constant-folding of COALESCE() expressions
pg_upgrade (formerly called pg_migrator) allows data stored
in PostgreSQL data files to be migrated to a later PostgreSQL
major version without the data dump/reload typically required
for major version upgrades, e.g. from 8.4.7 to the current
major release of PostgreSQL. It is not required for minor
version upgrades, e.g. from 9.0.1 to 9.0.4.
