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".
* 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 pg_restore's text output for large objects (BLOBs) when
standard_conforming_strings is on.
* 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 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 persistent slowdown of autovacuum workers when multiple workers
remain active for a long time
* 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
* Avoid memory leakage while "ANALYZE"'ing complex index expressions
* Ensure an index that uses a whole-row Var still depends on its
table
* Do not "inline" a SQL function with multiple OUT parameters
* Behave correctly if ORDER BY, LIMIT, FOR UPDATE, or WITH is
attached to the VALUES part of INSERT ... VALUES
* Fix constant-folding of COALESCE() expressions
* Fix postmaster crash when connection acceptance (accept() or one of
the calls made immediately after it) fails, and the postmaster was
compiled with GSSAPI support
* Fix missed unlink of temporary files when log_temp_files is active
* Add print functionality for InhRelation nodes
* Fix incorrect calculation of distance from a point to a horizontal
line segment
* Fix PL/pgSQL's handling of "simple" expressions to not fail in
recursion or error-recovery cases
* Fix PL/Python's handling of set-returning functions
* Fix bug in "contrib/cube"'s GiST picksplit algorithm
* Don't emit "identifier will be truncated" notices in
"contrib/dblink" except when creating new connections
* Fix potential coredump on missing public key in "contrib/pgcrypto"
* Fix memory leak in "contrib/xml2"'s XPath query functions
* Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2010o for DST law
changes in Fiji and Samoa; also historical corrections for Hong
Kong.
* Add new configuration parameter ssl_renegotiation_limit to control
how often we do session key renegotiation for an SSL connection
* Fix possible deadlock during backend startup
* Fix possible crashes due to not handling errors during relcache
reload cleanly
* Fix possible crash due to use of dangling pointer to a cached plan
* Fix possible crashes when trying to recover from a failure in
subtransaction start
* Fix server memory leak associated with use of savepoints and a
client encoding different from server's encoding
* Fix incorrect WAL data emitted during end-of-recovery cleanup of a
GIST index page split
* Make substring() for bit types treat any negative length as meaning
"all the rest of the string"
The previous coding treated only -1 that way, and would produce an
invalid result value for other negative values, possibly leading to
a crash (CVE-2010-0442).
* Fix integer-to-bit-string conversions to handle the first
fractional byte correctly when the output bit width is wider than
the given integer by something other than a multiple of 8 bits
* Fix some cases of pathologically slow regular expression matching
* Fix assorted crashes in xml processing caused by sloppy memory
management
* Fix bug with trying to update a field of an element of a
composite-type array column
* Fix the STOP WAL LOCATION entry in backup history files to report
the next WAL segment's name when the end location is exactly at a
segment boundary
* Fix some more cases of temporary-file leakage
This corrects a problem introduced in the previous minor release.
One case that failed is when a plpgsql function returning set is
called within another function's exception handler.
* Improve constraint exclusion processing of boolean-variable cases,
in particular make it possible to exclude a partition that has a
"bool_column = false" constraint
* When reading "pg_hba.conf" and related files, do not treat
@something as a file inclusion request if the @ appears inside
quote marks; also, never treat @ by itself as a file inclusion
request
* Prevent infinite loop on some platforms if a directory is named as
an inclusion target in "pg_hba.conf" and related files
* Fix possible infinite loop if SSL_read or SSL_write fails without
setting errno
This is reportedly possible with some Windows versions of openssl.
* Disallow GSSAPI authentication on local connections, since it
requires a hostname to function correctly
* Make ecpg report the proper SQLSTATE if the connection disappears
* Fix psql's numericlocale option to not format strings it shouldn't
in latex and troff output formats
* Make psql return the correct exit status (3) when ON_ERROR_STOP and
--single-transaction are both specified and an error occurs during
the implied "COMMIT"
* Fix plpgsql failure in one case where a composite column is set to NULL
* Fix possible failure when calling PL/Perl functions from PL/PerlU
or vice versa
* Add volatile markings in PL/Python to avoid possible
compiler-specific misbehavior
* Ensure PL/Tcl initializes the Tcl interpreter fully
The only known symptom of this oversight is that the Tcl clock
command misbehaves if using Tcl 8.5 or later.
* Prevent crash in "contrib/dblink" when too many key columns are
specified to a dblink_build_sql_* function
* Allow zero-dimensional arrays in "contrib/ltree" operations
* Fix assorted crashes in "contrib/xml2" caused by sloppy memory
management
* Make building of "contrib/xml2" more robust on Windows
* Fix race condition in Windows signal handling
One known symptom of this bug is that rows in pg_listener could be
dropped under heavy load.
* Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2010e for DST law
changes in Bangladesh, Chile, Fiji, Mexico, Paraguay, Samoa.
With significant new functionality and performance enhancements, this
release represents a major leap forward for PostgreSQL. This was made
possible by a growing community that has dramatically accelerated the
pace of development. This release adds the following major features:
* Full text search is integrated into the core database system
* Support for the SQL/XML standard, including new operators and an
XML data type
* Enumerated data types (ENUM)
* Arrays of composite types
* Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) data type
* Add control over whether NULLs sort first or last
* Updatable cursors
* Server configuration parameters can now be set on a per-function
basis
* User-defined types can now have type modifiers
* Automatically re-plan cached queries when table definitions change
or statistics are updated
* Numerous improvements in logging and statistics collection
* Support Security Service Provider Interface (SSPI) for
authentication on Windows
* Support multiple concurrent autovacuum processes, and other
autovacuum improvements
* Allow the whole PostgreSQL distribution to be compiled with
Microsoft Visual C++
