Release 8.3.9

PostgreSQL 8.4.2 Documentation
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# E.4. Release 8.3.9

> Release date: 2009-12-14

This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.8. For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see Section E.13.

## E.4.1. Migration to Version 8.3.9

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 the release notes for 8.3.8.

## E.4.2. Changes

- Protect against indirect security threats caused by index functions changing session-local state (Gurjeet Singh, Tom)

  This change prevents allegedly-immutable index functions from possibly subverting a superuser's session (CVE-2009-4136).

- Reject SSL certificates containing an embedded null byte in the common name (CN) field (Magnus)

  This prevents unintended matching of a certificate to a server or client name during SSL validation (CVE-2009-4034).

- Fix possible crash during backend-startup-time cache initialization (Tom)

- Avoid crash on empty thesaurus dictionary (Tom)

- Prevent signals from interrupting `VACUUM` at unsafe times (Alvaro)

  This fix prevents a PANIC if a `VACUUM FULL` is cancelled after it's already committed its tuple movements, as well as transient errors if a plain `VACUUM` is interrupted after having truncated the table.

- Fix possible crash due to integer overflow in hash table size calculation (Tom)

  This could occur with extremely large planner estimates for the size of a hashjoin's result.

- Fix very rare crash in `inet`/`cidr` comparisons (Chris Mikkelson)

- Ensure that shared tuple-level locks held by prepared transactions are not ignored (Heikki)

- Fix premature drop of temporary files used for a cursor that is accessed within a subtransaction (Heikki)

- Fix memory leak in syslogger process when rotating to a new CSV logfile (Tom)

- Fix Windows permission-downgrade logic (Jesse Morris)

  This fixes some cases where the database failed to start on Windows, often with misleading error messages such as "could not locate matching postgres executable".

- Fix incorrect logic for GiST index page splits, when the split depends on a non-first column of the index (Paul Ramsey)

- Don't error out if recycling or removing an old WAL file fails at the end of checkpoint (Heikki)

  It's better to treat the problem as non-fatal and allow the checkpoint to complete. Future checkpoints will retry the removal. Such problems are not expected in normal operation, but have been seen to be caused by misdesigned Windows anti-virus and backup software.

- Ensure WAL files aren't repeatedly archived on Windows (Heikki)

  This is another symptom that could happen if some other process interfered with deletion of a no-longer-needed file.

- Fix PAM password processing to be more robust (Tom)

  The previous code is known to fail with the combination of the Linux `pam_krb5` PAM module with Microsoft Active Directory as the domain controller. It might have problems elsewhere too, since it was making unjustified assumptions about what arguments the PAM stack would pass to it.

- Raise the maximum authentication token (Kerberos ticket) size in GSSAPI and SSPI authentication methods (Ian Turner)

  While the old 2000-byte limit was more than enough for Unix Kerberos implementations, tickets issued by Windows Domain Controllers can be much larger.

- Re-enable collection of access statistics for sequences (Akira Kurosawa)

  This used to work but was broken in 8.3.

- Fix processing of ownership dependencies during `CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION` (Tom)

- Fix incorrect handling of `WHERE` `x`=`x` conditions (Tom)

  In some cases these could get ignored as redundant, but they aren't — they're equivalent to `x` `IS NOT NULL`.

- Make text search parser accept underscores in XML attributes (Peter)

- Fix encoding handling in `xml` binary input (Heikki)

  If the XML header doesn't specify an encoding, we now assume UTF-8 by default; the previous handling was inconsistent.

- Fix bug with calling `plperl` from `plperlu` or vice versa (Tom)

  An error exit from the inner function could result in crashes due to failure to re-select the correct Perl interpreter for the outer function.

- Fix session-lifespan memory leak when a PL/Perl function is redefined (Tom)

- Ensure that Perl arrays are properly converted to PostgreSQL arrays when returned by a set-returning PL/Perl function (Andrew Dunstan, Abhijit Menon-Sen)

  This worked correctly already for non-set-returning functions.

- Fix rare crash in exception processing in PL/Python (Peter)

- In `contrib/pg_standby`, disable triggering failover with a signal on Windows (Fujii Masao)

  This never did anything useful, because Windows doesn't have Unix-style signals, but recent changes made it actually crash.

- Ensure psql's flex module is compiled with the correct system header definitions (Tom)

  This fixes build failures on platforms where `--enable-largefile` causes incompatible changes in the generated code.

- Make the postmaster ignore any `application_name` parameter in connection request packets, to improve compatibility with future libpq versions (Tom)

- Update the timezone abbreviation files to match current reality (Joachim Wieland)

  This includes adding `IDT` and `SGT` to the default timezone abbreviation set.

- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2009s for DST law changes in Antarctica, Argentina, Bangladesh, Fiji, Novokuznetsk, Pakistan, Palestine, Samoa, Syria; also historical corrections for Hong Kong.

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