Release date: never released
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.1. For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see Section E.172, « Release 8.3 ».
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.1, see Section E.171, « Release 8.3.1 ».
Fix ERRORDATA_STACK_SIZE exceeded crash that occurred on Windows when using UTF-8 database encoding and a different client encoding (Tom)
Fix incorrect archive truncation point calculation for the %r macro in restore_command parameters (Simon)
This could lead to data loss if a warm-standby script relied on %r to decide when to throw away WAL segment files.
Fix ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN ... PRIMARY KEY so that the new column is correctly checked to see if it's been initialized to all non-nulls (Brendan Jurd)
Previous versions neglected to check this requirement at all.
Fix REASSIGN OWNED so that it works on procedural languages too (Alvaro)
Fix problems with SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE occurring as a subquery in a query with a non-SELECT top-level operation (Tom)
Fix possible CREATE TABLE failure when inheriting the « same » constraint from multiple parent relations that inherited that constraint from a common ancestor (Tom)
Fix pg_get_ruledef() to show the alias, if any, attached to the target table of an UPDATE or DELETE (Tom)
Restore the pre-8.3 behavior that an out-of-range block number in a TID being used in a TidScan plan results in silently not matching any rows (Tom)
8.3.0 and 8.3.1 threw an error instead.
Fix GIN bug that could result in a too many LWLocks taken failure (Teodor)
Fix broken GiST comparison function for tsquery (Teodor)
Fix tsvector_update_trigger() and ts_stat() to accept domains over the types they expect to work with (Tom)
Fix failure to support enum data types as foreign keys (Tom)
Avoid possible crash when decompressing corrupted data (Zdenek Kotala)
Fix race conditions between delayed unlinks and DROP DATABASE (Heikki)
In the worst case this could result in deleting a newly created table in a new database that happened to get the same OID as the recently-dropped one; but of course that is an extremely low-probability scenario.
Repair two places where SIGTERM exit of a backend could leave corrupted state in shared memory (Tom)
Neither case is very important if SIGTERM is used to shut down the whole database cluster together, but there was a problem if someone tried to SIGTERM individual backends.
Fix possible crash due to incorrect plan generated for an x IN (SELECT y FROM ...) clause when x and y have different data types; and make sure the behavior is semantically correct when the conversion from y's type to x's type is lossy (Tom)
Fix oversight that prevented the planner from substituting known Param values as if they were constants (Tom)
This mistake partially disabled optimization of unnamed extended-Query statements in 8.3.0 and 8.3.1: in particular the LIKE-to-indexscan optimization would never be applied if the LIKE pattern was passed as a parameter, and constraint exclusion depending on a parameter value didn't work either.
Fix planner failure when an indexable MIN or MAX aggregate is used with DISTINCT or ORDER BY (Tom)
Fix planner to ensure it never uses a « physical tlist » for a plan node that is feeding a Sort node (Tom)
This led to the sort having to push around more data than it really needed to, since unused column values were included in the sorted data.
Avoid unnecessary copying of query strings (Tom)
This fixes a performance problem introduced in 8.3.0 when a very large number of commands are submitted as a single query string.
Make TransactionIdIsCurrentTransactionId() use binary search instead of linear search when checking child-transaction XIDs (Heikki)
This fixes some cases in which 8.3.0 was significantly slower than earlier releases.
Fix conversions between ISO-8859-5 and other encodings to handle Cyrillic « Yo » characters (e and E with two dots) (Sergey Burladyan)
Fix several datatype input functions, notably array_in(), that were allowing unused bytes in their results to contain uninitialized, unpredictable values (Tom)
This could lead to failures in which two apparently identical literal values were not seen as equal, resulting in the parser complaining about unmatched ORDER BY and DISTINCT expressions.
Fix a corner case in regular-expression substring matching (substring(string from pattern)) (Tom)
The problem occurs when there is a match to the pattern overall but the user has specified a parenthesized subexpression and that subexpression hasn't got a match. An example is substring('foo' from 'foo(bar)?'). This should return NULL, since (bar) isn't matched, but it was mistakenly returning the whole-pattern match instead (ie, foo).
Prevent cancellation of an auto-vacuum that was launched to prevent XID wraparound (Alvaro)
Improve ANALYZE's handling of in-doubt tuples (those inserted or deleted by a not-yet-committed transaction) so that the counts it reports to the stats collector are more likely to be correct (Pavan Deolasee)
Fix initdb to reject a relative path for its --xlogdir (-X) option (Tom)
Make psql print tab characters as an appropriate number of spaces, rather than \x09 as was done in 8.3.0 and 8.3.1 (Bruce)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2008c (for DST law changes in Morocco, Iraq, Choibalsan, Pakistan, Syria, Cuba, and Argentina/San_Luis)
Add ECPGget_PGconn() function to ecpglib (Michael)
Fix incorrect result from ecpg's PGTYPEStimestamp_sub() function (Michael)
Fix handling of continuation line markers in ecpg (Michael)
Fix possible crashes in contrib/cube functions (Tom)
Fix core dump in contrib/xml2's xpath_table() function when the input query returns a NULL value (Tom)
Fix contrib/xml2's makefile to not override CFLAGS, and make it auto-configure properly for libxslt present or not (Tom)