Release date: 2004-10-22
This release contains a variety of fixes from 7.4.5. For information about new features in the 7.4 major release, see Section E.277, « Release 7.4 ».
A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X.
Repair possible failure to update hint bits on disk
Under rare circumstances this oversight could lead to « could not access transaction status » failures, which qualifies it as a potential-data-loss bug.
Ensure that hashed outer join does not miss tuples
Very large left joins using a hash join plan could fail to output unmatched left-side rows given just the right data distribution.
Disallow running pg_ctl as root
This is to guard against any possible security issues.
Avoid using temp files in /tmp in make_oidjoins_check
This has been reported as a security issue, though it's hardly worthy of concern since there is no reason for non-developers to use this script anyway.
Prevent forced backend shutdown from re-emitting prior command result
In rare cases, a client might think that its last command had succeeded when it really had been aborted by forced database shutdown.
Repair bug in pg_stat_get_backend_idset
This could lead to misbehavior in some of the system-statistics views.
Fix small memory leak in postmaster
Fix « expected both swapped tables to have TOAST tables » bug
This could arise in cases such as CLUSTER after ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN.
Prevent pg_ctl restart from adding -D multiple times
Fix problem with NULL values in GiST indexes
:: is no longer interpreted as a variable in an ECPG prepare statement