Release date: 2013-12-05
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.4.18. For information about new features in the 8.4 major release, see Section E.175.
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.4.X.
However, this release corrects a potential data corruption issue. See the first changelog entry below to find out whether your installation has been affected and what steps you can take if so.
Also, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.4.17, see Section E.158.
Fix VACUUM
's tests to see whether it can
update relfrozenxid
(Andres Freund)
In some cases VACUUM
(either manual or autovacuum) could
incorrectly advance a table's relfrozenxid
value,
allowing tuples to escape freezing, causing those rows to become
invisible once 2^31 transactions have elapsed. The probability of
data loss is fairly low since multiple incorrect advancements would
need to happen before actual loss occurs, but it's not zero. Users
upgrading from release 8.4.8 or earlier are not affected, but all later
versions contain the bug.
The issue can be ameliorated by, after upgrading, vacuuming all tables
in all databases while having vacuum_freeze_table_age
set to zero. This will fix any latent corruption but will not be able
to fix all pre-existing data errors. However, an installation can be
presumed safe after performing this vacuuming if it has executed fewer
than 2^31 update transactions in its lifetime (check this with
SELECT txid_current() < 2^31
).
Fix race condition in GIN index posting tree page deletion (Heikki Linnakangas)
This could lead to transient wrong answers or query failures.
Avoid flattening a subquery whose SELECT
list contains a
volatile function wrapped inside a sub-SELECT
(Tom Lane)
This avoids unexpected results due to extra evaluations of the volatile function.
Fix planner's processing of non-simple-variable subquery outputs nested within outer joins (Tom Lane)
This error could lead to incorrect plans for queries involving
multiple levels of subqueries within JOIN
syntax.
Fix premature deletion of temporary files (Andres Freund)
Fix possible read past end of memory in rule printing (Peter Eisentraut)
Fix array slicing of int2vector
and oidvector
values
(Tom Lane)
Expressions of this kind are now implicitly promoted to
regular int2
or oid
arrays.
Fix incorrect behaviors when using a SQL-standard, simple GMT offset timezone (Tom Lane)
In some cases, the system would use the simple GMT offset value when
it should have used the regular timezone setting that had prevailed
before the simple offset was selected. This change also causes
the timeofday
function to honor the simple GMT offset
zone.
Prevent possible misbehavior when logging translations of Windows error codes (Tom Lane)
Properly quote generated command lines in pg_ctl (Naoya Anzai and Tom Lane)
This fix applies only to Windows.
Fix pg_dumpall to work when a source database
sets default_transaction_read_only
via ALTER DATABASE SET
(Kevin Grittner)
Previously, the generated script would fail during restore.
Fix ecpg's processing of lists of variables
declared varchar
(Zoltán Böszörményi)
Make contrib/lo
defend against incorrect trigger definitions
(Marc Cousin)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2013h for DST law changes in Argentina, Brazil, Jordan, Libya, Liechtenstein, Morocco, and Palestine. Also, new timezone abbreviations WIB, WIT, WITA for Indonesia.