Release 8.4.3

PostgreSQL 9.3.4 Documentation
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# E.65. Release 8.4.3

> Release Date: 2010-03-15

This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.4.2. For information about new features in the 8.4 major release, see Section E.68.

## E.65.1. 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 Section E.66.

## E.65.2. 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.

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