Release date: 2011-09-26
This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.15. For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see Section E.171, « 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 8.3.8, see Section E.163, « Release 8.3.8 ».
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)
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.
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 performance problem when constructing a large, lossy bitmap (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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.