PostgreSQL 8.4.15 Documentation
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# E.7. Release 8.4.9

> Release Date: 2011-09-26

This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.4.8. For information about new features in the 8.4 major release, see Section E.16.

## E.7.1. Migration to Version 8.4.9

A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.4.X.

However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.4.8, see the release notes for 8.4.8.

## E.7.2. Changes

- Fix bugs in indexing of in-doubt HOT-updated tuples (Tom Lane)

  These bugs could result in index corruption after reindexing a system catalog. They are not believed to affect user indexes.

- Fix multiple bugs in GiST index page split processing (Heikki Linnakangas)

  The probability of occurrence was low, but these could lead to index corruption.

- Fix possible buffer overrun in `tsvector_concat()` (Tom Lane)

  The function could underestimate the amount of memory needed for its result, leading to server crashes.

- Fix crash in `xml_recv` when processing a "standalone" parameter (Tom Lane)

- Make `pg_options_to_table` return NULL for an option with no value (Tom Lane)

  Previously such cases would result in a server crash.

- Avoid possibly accessing off the end of memory in `ANALYZE` and in SJIS-2004 encoding conversion (Noah Misch)

  This fixes some very-low-probability server crash scenarios.

- Prevent intermittent hang in interactions of startup process with bgwriter process (Simon Riggs)

  This affected recovery in non-hot-standby cases.

- Fix race condition in relcache init file invalidation (Tom Lane)

  There was a window wherein a new backend process could read a stale init file but miss the inval messages that would tell it the data is stale. The result would be bizarre failures in catalog accesses, typically "could not read block 0 in file ..." later during startup.

- Fix memory leak at end of a GiST index scan (Tom Lane)

  Commands that perform many separate GiST index scans, such as verification of a new GiST-based exclusion constraint on a table already containing many rows, could transiently require large amounts of memory due to this leak.

- Fix incorrect memory accounting (leading to possible memory bloat) in tuplestores supporting holdable cursors and plpgsql's `RETURN NEXT` command (Tom Lane)

- Fix performance problem when constructing a large, lossy bitmap (Tom Lane)

- Fix join selectivity estimation for unique columns (Tom Lane)

  This fixes an erroneous planner heuristic that could lead to poor estimates of the result size of a join.

- Fix nested PlaceHolderVar expressions that appear only in sub-select target lists (Tom Lane)

  This mistake could result in outputs of an outer join incorrectly appearing as NULL.

- Allow nested `EXISTS` queries to be optimized properly (Tom Lane)

- Fix array- and path-creating functions to ensure padding bytes are zeroes (Tom Lane)

  This avoids some situations where the planner will think that semantically-equal constants are not equal, resulting in poor optimization.

- Fix `EXPLAIN` to handle gating Result nodes within inner-indexscan subplans (Tom Lane)

  The usual symptom of this oversight was "bogus varno" errors.

- Work around gcc 4.6.0 bug that breaks WAL replay (Tom Lane)

  This could lead to loss of committed transactions after a server crash.

- Fix dump bug for `VALUES` in a view (Tom Lane)

- Disallow `SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE` on sequences (Tom Lane)

  This operation doesn't work as expected and can lead to failures.

- Fix `VACUUM` so that it always updates `pg_class`.`reltuples`/`relpages` (Tom Lane)

  This fixes some scenarios where autovacuum could make increasingly poor decisions about when to vacuum tables.

- Defend against integer overflow when computing size of a hash table (Tom Lane)

- Fix cases where `CLUSTER` might attempt to access already-removed TOAST data (Tom Lane)

- Fix portability bugs in use of credentials control messages for "peer" authentication (Tom Lane)

- Fix SSPI login when multiple roundtrips are required (Ahmed Shinwari, Magnus Hagander)

  The typical symptom of this problem was "The function requested is not supported" errors during SSPI login.

- Throw an error if `pg_hba.conf` contains `hostssl` but SSL is disabled (Tom Lane)

  This was concluded to be more user-friendly than the previous behavior of silently ignoring such lines.

- Fix typo in `pg_srand48` seed initialization (Andres Freund)

  This led to failure to use all bits of the provided seed. This function is not used on most platforms (only those without `srandom`), and the potential security exposure from a less-random-than-expected seed seems minimal in any case.

- Avoid integer overflow when the sum of `LIMIT` and `OFFSET` values exceeds 2^63 (Heikki Linnakangas)

- Add overflow checks to `int4` and `int8` versions of `generate_series()` (Robert Haas)

- Fix trailing-zero removal in `to_char()` (Marti Raudsepp)

  In a format with `FM` and no digit positions after the decimal point, zeroes to the left of the decimal point could be removed incorrectly.

- Fix `pg_size_pretty()` to avoid overflow for inputs close to 2^63 (Tom Lane)

- Weaken plpgsql's check for typmod matching in record values (Tom Lane)

  An overly enthusiastic check could lead to discarding length modifiers that should have been kept.

- Correctly handle quotes in locale names during initdb (Heikki Linnakangas)

  The case can arise with some Windows locales, such as "People's Republic of China".

- Fix pg_upgrade to preserve toast tables' relfrozenxids during an upgrade from 8.3 (Bruce Momjian)

  Failure to do this could lead to `pg_clog` files being removed too soon after the upgrade.

- In pg_ctl, support silent mode for service registrations on Windows (MauMau)

- Fix psql's counting of script file line numbers during `COPY` from a different file (Tom Lane)

- Fix pg_restore's direct-to-database mode for `standard_conforming_strings` (Tom Lane)

  pg_restore could emit incorrect commands when restoring directly to a database server from an archive file that had been made with `standard_conforming_strings` set to `on`.

- Be more user-friendly about unsupported cases for parallel pg_restore (Tom Lane)

  This change ensures that such cases are detected and reported before any restore actions have been taken.

- Fix write-past-buffer-end and memory leak in libpq's LDAP service lookup code (Albe Laurenz)

- In libpq, avoid failures when using nonblocking I/O and an SSL connection (Martin Pihlak, Tom Lane)

- Improve libpq's handling of failures during connection startup (Tom Lane)

  In particular, the response to a server report of `fork()` failure during SSL connection startup is now saner.

- Improve libpq's error reporting for SSL failures (Tom Lane)

- Fix `PQsetvalue()` to avoid possible crash when adding a new tuple to a `PGresult` originally obtained from a server query (Andrew Chernow)

- Make ecpglib write `double` values with 15 digits precision (Akira Kurosawa)

- In ecpglib, be sure `LC_NUMERIC` setting is restored after an error (Michael Meskes)

- Apply upstream fix for blowfish signed-character bug (CVE-2011-2483) (Tom Lane)

  `contrib/pg_crypto`'s blowfish encryption code could give wrong results on platforms where char is signed (which is most), leading to encrypted passwords being weaker than they should be.

- Fix memory leak in `contrib/seg` (Heikki Linnakangas)

- Fix `pgstatindex()` to give consistent results for empty indexes (Tom Lane)

- Allow building with perl 5.14 (Alex Hunsaker)

- Update configure script's method for probing existence of system functions (Tom Lane)

  The version of autoconf we used in 8.3 and 8.2 could be fooled by compilers that perform link-time optimization.

- Fix assorted issues with build and install file paths containing spaces (Tom Lane)

- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2011i for DST law changes in Canada, Egypt, Russia, Samoa, and South Sudan.

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