Release 8.3.1

PostgreSQL 8.4.2 Documentation
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# E.12. Release 8.3.1

> Release date: 2008-03-17

This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.0. For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see Section E.13.

## E.12.1. Migration to Version 8.3.1

A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X. However, you might need to `REINDEX` indexes on textual columns after updating, if you are affected by the Windows locale issue described below.

## E.12.2. Changes

- Fix character string comparison for Windows locales that consider different character combinations as equal (Tom)

  This fix applies only on Windows and only when using UTF-8 database encoding. The same fix was made for all other cases over two years ago, but Windows with UTF-8 uses a separate code path that was not updated. If you are using a locale that considers some non-identical strings as equal, you may need to `REINDEX` to fix existing indexes on textual columns.

- Repair corner-case bugs in `VACUUM FULL` (Tom)

  A potential deadlock between concurrent `VACUUM FULL` operations on different system catalogs was introduced in 8.2. This has now been corrected. 8.3 made this worse because the deadlock could occur within a critical code section, making it a PANIC rather than just ERROR condition.

  Also, a `VACUUM FULL` that failed partway through vacuuming a system catalog could result in cache corruption in concurrent database sessions.

  Another `VACUUM FULL` bug introduced in 8.3 could result in a crash or out-of-memory report when dealing with pages containing no live tuples.

- Fix misbehavior of foreign key checks involving `character` or `bit` columns (Tom)

  If the referencing column were of a different but compatible type (for instance `varchar`), the constraint was enforced incorrectly.

- Avoid needless deadlock failures in no-op foreign-key checks (Stephan Szabo, Tom)

- Fix possible core dump when re-planning a prepared query (Tom)

  This bug affected only protocol-level prepare operations, not SQL `PREPARE`, and so tended to be seen only with JDBC, DBI, and other client-side drivers that use prepared statements heavily.

- Fix possible failure when re-planning a query that calls an SPI-using function (Tom)

- Fix failure in row-wise comparisons involving columns of different datatypes (Tom)

- Fix longstanding `LISTEN`/`NOTIFY` race condition (Tom)

  In rare cases a session that had just executed a `LISTEN` might not get a notification, even though one would be expected because the concurrent transaction executing `NOTIFY` was observed to commit later.

  A side effect of the fix is that a transaction that has executed a not-yet-committed `LISTEN` command will not see any row in `pg_listener` for the `LISTEN`, should it choose to look; formerly it would have. This behavior was never documented one way or the other, but it is possible that some applications depend on the old behavior.

- Disallow `LISTEN` and `UNLISTEN` within a prepared transaction (Tom)

  This was formerly allowed but trying to do it had various unpleasant consequences, notably that the originating backend could not exit as long as an `UNLISTEN` remained uncommitted.

- Disallow dropping a temporary table within a prepared transaction (Heikki)

  This was correctly disallowed by 8.1, but the check was inadvertently broken in 8.2 and 8.3.

- Fix rare crash when an error occurs during a query using a hash index (Heikki)

- Fix incorrect comparison of `tsquery` values (Teodor)

- Fix incorrect behavior of `LIKE` with non-ASCII characters in single-byte encodings (Rolf Jentsch)

- Disable `xmlvalidate` (Tom)

  This function should have been removed before 8.3 release, but was inadvertently left in the source code. It poses a small security risk since unprivileged users could use it to read the first few characters of any file accessible to the server.

- Fix memory leaks in certain usages of set-returning functions (Neil)

- Make `encode(`bytea`, 'escape')` convert all high-bit-set byte values into `\``nnn` octal escape sequences (Tom)

  This is necessary to avoid encoding problems when the database encoding is multi-byte. This change could pose compatibility issues for applications that are expecting specific results from `encode`.

- Fix input of datetime values for February 29 in years BC (Tom)

  The former coding was mistaken about which years were leap years.

- Fix "unrecognized node type" error in some variants of `ALTER OWNER` (Tom)

- Avoid tablespace permissions errors in `CREATE TABLE LIKE INCLUDING INDEXES` (Tom)

- Ensure `pg_stat_activity`.`waiting` flag is cleared when a lock wait is aborted (Tom)

- Fix handling of process permissions on Windows Vista (Dave, Magnus)

  In particular, this fix allows starting the server as the Administrator user.

- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2008a (in particular, recent Chile changes); adjust timezone abbreviation `VET` (Venezuela) to mean UTC-4:30, not UTC-4:00 (Tom)

- Fix ecpg problems with arrays (Michael)

- Fix pg_ctl to correctly extract the postmaster's port number from command-line options (Itagaki Takahiro, Tom)

  Previously, `pg_ctl start -w` could try to contact the postmaster on the wrong port, leading to bogus reports of startup failure.

- Use `-fwrapv` to defend against possible misoptimization in recent gcc versions (Tom)

  This is known to be necessary when building PostgreSQL with gcc 4.3 or later.

- Enable building `contrib/uuid-ossp` with MSVC (Hiroshi Saito)

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