E.11.1. Migration to Version 8.4.3

A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.4.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.4.2, see the release notes for 8.4.2.

E.11.2. Changes

• Add new configuration parameter ssl_renegotiation_limit to control how often we do session key renegotiation for an SSL connection (Magnus)

  This can be set to zero to disable renegotiation completely, which may be required if a broken SSL library is used. In particular, some vendors are shipping stopgap patches for CVE-2009-3555 that cause renegotiation attempts to fail.

• Fix possible deadlock during backend startup (Tom)

• Fix possible crashes due to not handling errors during relcache reload cleanly (Tom)

• Fix possible crash due to use of dangling pointer to a cached plan (Tatsuo)

• Fix possible crash due to overenthusiastic invalidation of cached plan for ROLLBACK (Tom)

• Fix possible crashes when trying to recover from a failure in subtransaction start (Tom)

• Fix server memory leak associated with use of savepoints and a client encoding different from server's encoding (Tom)

• Fix incorrect WAL data emitted during end-of-recovery cleanup of a GIST index page split (Yoichi Hirai)

  This would result in index corruption, or even more likely an error during WAL replay, if we were unlucky enough to crash during end-of-recovery cleanup after having completed an incomplete GIST insertion.

• Fix bug in WAL redo cleanup method for GIN indexes (Heikki)

• Fix incorrect comparison of scan key in GIN index search (Teodor)

• Make substring() for bit types treat any negative length as meaning "all the rest of the string" (Tom)

  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 (Tom)

• Fix some cases of pathologically slow regular expression matching (Tom)

• Fix bug occurring when trying to inline a SQL function that returns a set of a composite type that contains dropped columns (Tom)

• Fix bug with trying to update a field of an element of a composite-type array column (Tom)

• Avoid failure when EXPLAIN has to print a FieldStore or assignment ArrayRef expression (Tom)

  These cases can arise now that EXPLAIN VERBOSE tries to print plan node target lists.

• Avoid an unnecessary coercion failure in some cases where an undecorated literal string appears in a subquery within UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT (Tom)

  This fixes a regression for some cases that worked before 8.4.

• Avoid undesirable rowtype compatibility check failures in some cases where a whole-row Var has a rowtype that contains dropped columns (Tom)

• 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 (Itagaki Takahiro)

• Always pass the catalog ID to an option validator function specified in CREATE FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER (Martin Pihlak)

• Fix some more cases of temporary-file leakage (Heikki)

  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.

• Add support for doing FULL JOIN ON FALSE (Tom)

  This prevents a regression from pre-8.4 releases for some queries that can now be simplified to a constant-false join condition.

• Improve constraint exclusion processing of boolean-variable cases, in particular make it possible to exclude a partition that has a "bool_column = false" constraint (Tom)

• Prevent treating an INOUT cast as representing binary compatibility (Heikki)

• Include column name in the message when warning about inability to grant or revoke column-level privileges (Stephen Frost)

  This is more useful than before and helps to prevent confusion when a REVOKE generates multiple messages, which formerly appeared to be duplicates.

• 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 (Tom)

  This prevents erratic behavior if a role or database name starts with @. If you need to include a file whose path name contains spaces, you can still do so, but you must write @"/path to/file" rather than putting the quotes around the whole construct.

• Prevent infinite loop on some platforms if a directory is named as an inclusion target in pg_hba.conf and related files (Tom)

• Fix possible infinite loop if SSL_read or SSL_write fails without setting errno (Tom)

  This is reportedly possible with some Windows versions of openssl.

• Disallow GSSAPI authentication on local connections, since it requires a hostname to function correctly (Magnus)

• Protect ecpg against applications freeing strings unexpectedly (Michael)

• Make ecpg report the proper SQLSTATE if the connection disappears (Michael)

• Fix translation of cell contents in psql \d output (Heikki)

• Fix psql's numericlocale option to not format strings it shouldn't in latex and troff output formats (Heikki)

• Fix a small per-query memory leak in psql (Tom)

• 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 (Bruce)

• Fix pg_dump's output of permissions for foreign servers (Heikki)

• Fix possible crash in parallel pg_restore due to out-of-range dependency IDs (Tom)

• Fix plpgsql failure in one case where a composite column is set to NULL (Tom)

• Fix possible failure when calling PL/Perl functions from PL/PerlU or vice versa (Tim Bunce)

• Add volatile markings in PL/Python to avoid possible compiler-specific misbehavior (Zdenek Kotala)

• Ensure PL/Tcl initializes the Tcl interpreter fully (Tom)

  The only known symptom of this oversight is that the Tcl clock command misbehaves if using Tcl 8.5 or later.

• Prevent ExecutorEnd from being run on portals created within a failed transaction or subtransaction (Tom)

  This is known to cause issues when using contrib/auto_explain.

• Prevent crash in contrib/dblink when too many key columns are specified to a dblink_build_sql_* function (Rushabh Lathia, Joe Conway)

• Allow zero-dimensional arrays in contrib/ltree operations (Tom)

  This case was formerly rejected as an error, but it's more convenient to treat it the same as a zero-element array. In particular this avoids unnecessary failures when an ltree operation is applied to the result of ARRAY(SELECT ...) and the sub-select returns no rows.

• Fix assorted crashes in contrib/xml2 caused by sloppy memory management (Tom)

• Make building of contrib/xml2 more robust on Windows (Andrew)

• Fix race condition in Windows signal handling (Radu Ilie)

  One known symptom of this bug is that rows in pg_listener could be dropped under heavy load.

• Make the configure script report failure if the C compiler does not provide a working 64-bit integer datatype (Tom)

  This case has been broken for some time, and no longer seems worth supporting, so just reject it at configure time instead.

• Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2010e for DST law changes in Bangladesh, Chile, Fiji, Mexico, Paraguay, Samoa.