Release date: 2008-09-22
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.2.9. For information about new features in the 8.2 major release, see Section E.195, « Release 8.2 ».
A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.2.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.2.7, see Section E.188, « Release 8.2.7 ».
Fix bug in btree WAL recovery code (Heikki)
Recovery failed if the WAL ended partway through a page split operation.
Fix potential miscalculation of datfrozenxid (Alvaro)
This error may explain some recent reports of failure to remove old pg_clog data.
Widen local lock counters from 32 to 64 bits (Tom)
This responds to reports that the counters could overflow in sufficiently long transactions, leading to unexpected « lock is already held » errors.
Fix possible duplicate output of tuples during a GiST index scan (Teodor)
Fix missed permissions checks when a view contains a simple UNION ALL construct (Heikki)
Permissions for the referenced tables were checked properly, but not permissions for the view itself.
Add checks in executor startup to ensure that the tuples produced by an INSERT or UPDATE will match the target table's current rowtype (Tom)
ALTER COLUMN TYPE, followed by re-use of a previously cached plan, could produce this type of situation. The check protects against data corruption and/or crashes that could ensue.
Fix possible repeated drops during DROP OWNED (Tom)
This would typically result in strange errors such as « cache lookup failed for relation NNN ».
Fix AT TIME ZONE to first try to interpret its timezone argument as a timezone abbreviation, and only try it as a full timezone name if that fails, rather than the other way around as formerly (Tom)
The timestamp input functions have always resolved ambiguous zone names in this order. Making AT TIME ZONE do so as well improves consistency, and fixes a compatibility bug introduced in 8.1: in ambiguous cases we now behave the same as 8.0 and before did, since in the older versions AT TIME ZONE accepted only abbreviations.
Fix datetime input functions to correctly detect integer overflow when running on a 64-bit platform (Tom)
Prevent integer overflows during units conversion when displaying a configuration parameter that has units (Tom)
Improve performance of writing very long log messages to syslog (Tom)
Allow spaces in the suffix part of an LDAP URL in pg_hba.conf (Tom)
Fix bug in backwards scanning of a cursor on a SELECT DISTINCT ON query (Tom)
Fix planner bug with nested sub-select expressions (Tom)
If the outer sub-select has no direct dependency on the parent query, but the inner one does, the outer value might not get recalculated for new parent query rows.
Fix planner to estimate that GROUP BY expressions yielding boolean results always result in two groups, regardless of the expressions' contents (Tom)
This is very substantially more accurate than the regular GROUP BY estimate for certain boolean tests like col IS NULL.
Fix PL/pgSQL to not fail when a FOR loop's target variable is a record containing composite-type fields (Tom)
Fix PL/Tcl to behave correctly with Tcl 8.5, and to be more careful about the encoding of data sent to or from Tcl (Tom)
On Windows, work around a Microsoft bug by preventing libpq from trying to send more than 64kB per system call (Magnus)
Improve pg_dump and pg_restore's error reporting after failure to send a SQL command (Tom)
Fix pg_ctl to properly preserve postmaster command-line arguments across a restart (Bruce)
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2008f (for DST law changes in Argentina, Bahamas, Brazil, Mauritius, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, and Paraguay)