PostgreSQL 17.3

What's new in this version:

- Harden PQescapeString and allied functions against invalidly-encoded input strings
- Data-quoting functions supplied by libpq now fully check the encoding validity of their input. If invalid characters are detected, they report an error if possible. For the ones that lack an error return convention, the output string is adjusted to ensure that the server will report invalid encoding and no intervening processing will be fooled by bytes that might happen to match single quote, backslash, etc.
- The purpose of this change is to guard against SQL-injection attacks that are possible if one of these functions is used to quote crafted input. There is no hazard when the resulting string is sent directly to a PostgreSQL server -(which would check its encoding anyway), but there is a risk when it is passed through psql or other client-side code. Historically such code has not carefully vetted encoding, and in many cases it's not clear what it should do if it did detect such a problem.
- This fix is effective only if the data-quoting function, the server, and any intermediate processing agree on the character encoding that's being used. Applications that insert untrusted input into SQL commands should take special care to ensure that that's true.
- Applications and drivers that quote untrusted input without using these libpq functions may be at risk of similar problems. They should first confirm the data is valid in the encoding expected by the server.
- The PostgreSQL Project thanks Stephen Fewer for reporting this problem.
- Restore auto-truncation of database and user names appearing in connection requests
- This reverts a v17 change that proved to cause trouble for some users. Over-length names should be truncated in an encoding-aware fashion, but for now just return to the former behavior of blind truncation at NAMEDATALEN-1 bytes.
- Exclude parallel workers from connection privilege checks and limits
- Do not check datallowconn, rolcanlogin, and ACL_CONNECT privileges when starting a parallel worker, instead assuming that it's enough for the leader process to have passed similar checks originally. This avoids, for example, unexpected failures of parallelized queries when the leader is running as a role that lacks login privilege. In the same vein, enforce ReservedConnections, datconnlimit, and rolconnlimit limits only against regular backends, and count only regular backends while checking if the limits were already reached. Those limits are meant to prevent excessive consumption of process slots for regular backends --- but parallel workers and other special processes have their own pools of process slots with their own limit checks.
- Drop “Lock” suffix from LWLock wait event names
- Refactoring unintentionally caused the pg_stat_activity view to show lock-related wait event names with a “Lock” suffix, which among other things broke joining it to pg_wait_events.
- Fix possible failure to return all matching tuples for a btree index scan with a ScalarArrayOp
- Fix possible re-use of stale results in window aggregates
- A window aggregate with a “run condition” optimization and a pass-by-reference result type might incorrectly return the result from the previous partition instead of performing a fresh calculation.
- Keep TransactionXmin in sync with MyProc->xmin
- This oversight could permit a process to try to access data that had already been vacuumed away. One known consequence is transient “could not access status of transaction” errors.
- Fix race condition that could cause failure to add a newly-inserted catalog entry to a catalog cache list
- This could result, for example, in failure to use a newly-created function within an existing session.
- Prevent possible catalog corruption when a system catalog is vacuumed concurrently with an update
- Fix data corruption when relation truncation fails
- The filesystem calls needed to perform relation truncation could fail, leaving inconsistent state on disk
- Prevent checkpoints from starting during relation truncation
- This avoids a race condition wherein the modified file might not get fsync'd before completing the checkpoint, creating a risk of data corruption if the operating system crashes soon after.
- Avoid possibly losing an update of pg_database.datfrozenxid when VACUUM runs concurrently with a REASSIGN OWNED that changes that database's owner
- Fix incorrect tg_updatedcols values passed to AFTER UPDATE triggers
- In some cases the tg_updatedcols bitmap could describe the set of columns updated by an earlier command in the same transaction, fooling the trigger into doing the wrong thing.
- Also, prevent memory bloat caused by making too many copies of the tg_updatedcols bitmap.
- Fix detach of a partition that has its own foreign-key constraint referencing a partitioned table
- In common cases, foreign keys are defined on a partitioned table's top level; but if instead one is defined on a partition and references a partitioned table, and the referencing partition is detached, the relevant pg_constraint entries were updated incorrectly. This led to errors like “could not find ON INSERT check triggers of foreign key constraint”.
- Fix pg_get_constraintdef's support for NOT NULL constraints on domains
- Fix mis-processing of to_timestamp's FFn format codes
- An integer format code immediately preceding FFn would consume all available digits, leaving none for FFn.
- When deparsing a PASSING clause in a SQL/JSON query function, ensure that variable names are double-quoted when necessary
- When deparsing an XMLTABLE() expression, ensure that XML namespace names are double-quoted when necessary
- Include the ldapscheme option in pg_hba_file_rules() output
- Fix planning of pre-sorted UNION operations for cases where the input column datatypes don't all match
- This error could lead to sorting data with the wrong sort operator, with consequences ranging from no visible problem to core dumps.
- Don't merge UNION operations if their column collations aren't consistent
- Previously we ignored collations when deciding if it's safe to merge UNION steps into a single N-way UNION operation. This was arguably valid before the introduction of nondeterministic collations, but it's not anymore, since the collation in use can affect the definition of uniqueness.
- Prevent “wrong varnullingrels” planner errors after pulling up a subquery that's underneath an outer join
- Ignore nulling-relation marker bits when looking up statistics
- This oversight could lead to failure to use relevant statistics about expressions, or to “corrupt MVNDistinct entry” errors.
- Fix missed expression processing for partition pruning steps
- This oversight could lead to “unrecognized node type” errors, and perhaps other problems, in queries accessing partitioned tables.
- Give the slotsync worker process its own process slot
- This was overlooked in the addition of the slotsync worker, with the result that its process slot effectively came out of the pool meant for regular backend processes. This could result in failure to launch the worker, or to subsequent failures of connection requests that should have succeeded according to the configured settings, if the number of regular backend processes approached max_connections.
- Allow dshash tables to grow past 1GB
- This avoids errors like “invalid DSA memory alloc request size”. The case can occur for example in transactions that process several million tables.
- Avoid possible integer overflow in bringetbitmap()
- Since the result is only used for statistical purposes, the effects of this error were mostly cosmetic.
- Correct miscalculation of SLRU bank numbers
- This error led to using a smaller number of banks than intended, causing more contention but no functional misbehavior.
- Ensure that an already-set process latch doesn't prevent the postmaster from noticing socket events
- An extremely heavy workload of backends launching workers and workers exiting could prevent the postmaster from responding to incoming client connections in a timely fashion.
- Prevent streaming standby servers from looping infinitely when reading a WAL record that crosses pages
- This would happen when the record's continuation is on a page that needs to be read from a different WAL source.
- Fix unintended promotion of FATAL errors to PANIC during early process startup
- This fixes some unlikely cases that would result in “PANIC: proc_exit() called in child process”.
- Fix cases where an operator family member operator or support procedure could become a dangling reference
- In some cases a data type could be dropped while references to its OID still remain in pg_amop or pg_amproc. While that caused no immediate issues, an attempt to drop the owning operator family would fail, and pg_dump would produce bogus output when dumping the operator family. This fix causes creation and modification of operator families/classes to add needed dependency entries so that dropping a data type will also drop any dependent operator family elements. That does not help vulnerable pre-existing operator families, though, so a band-aid has also been added to DROP OPERATOR FAMILY to prevent failure when dropping a family that has dangling members.
- Fix multiple memory leaks in logical decoding output
- Fix small memory leak when updating the application_name or cluster_name settings
- Avoid crash when a background process tries to check a new value of synchronized_standby_slots
- Avoid integer overflow while testing wal_skip_threshold condition
- A transaction that created a very large relation could mistakenly decide to ensure durability by copying the relation into WAL instead of fsync'ing it, thereby negating the point of wal_skip_threshold.
- Fix unsafe order of operations during cache lookups
- The only known consequence was a usually-harmless “you don't own a lock of type ExclusiveLock” warning during GRANT TABLESPACE.
- Avoid potential use-after-free in parallel vacuum
- This bug seems to have no consequences in standard builds, but it's theoretically a hazard.
- Fix possible “failed to resolve name” failures when using JIT on older ARM platforms
- This could occur as a consequence of inconsistency about the default setting of -moutline-atomics between gcc and clang. At least Debian and Ubuntu are known to ship gcc and clang compilers that target armv8-a but differ on the use of outline atomics by default.
- Fix assertion failure in WITH RECURSIVE ... UNION queries
- Avoid assertion failure in rule deparsing if a set operation leaf query contains set operations
- Avoid edge-case assertion failure in parallel query startup
- Fix assertion failure at shutdown when writing out the statistics file
- Avoid valgrind complaints about string hashing code
- In NULLIF(), avoid passing a read-write expanded object pointer to the data type's equality function
- The equality function could modify or delete the object if it's given a read-write pointer, which would be bad if we decide to return it as the NULLIF() result. There is probably no problem with any built-in equality function, but it's easy to demonstrate a failure with one coded in PL/pgSQL.
- Ensure that expression preprocessing is applied to a default null value in INSERT
- If the target column is of a domain type, the planner must insert a coerce-to-domain step not just a null constant, and this expression missed going through some required processing steps. There is no known consequence with domains based on core data types, but in theory an error could occur with domains based on extension types.
- Avoid data loss when starting a bulk write on a relation fork that already contains data
- Any pre-existing data was overwritten with zeroes. This is not an issue for core PostgreSQL, which never does that. Some extensions would like to, however.
- Avoid crash if a server process tried to iterate over a shared radix tree that it didn't create
- There is no code in core PostgreSQL that does this, but an extension might wish to.
- Repair memory leaks in PL/Python
- Repeated use of PLyPlan.execute or plpy.cursor resulted in memory leakage for the duration of the calling PL/Python function.
- Fix PL/Tcl to compile with Tcl 9
- In the ecpg preprocessor, fix possible misprocessing of cursors that reference out-of-scope variables
- In ecpg, fix compile-time warnings about unsupported use of COPY ... FROM STDIN
- Previously, the intended warning was not issued due to a typo.
- Fix psql to safely handle file path names that are encoded in SJIS
- Some two-byte characters in SJIS have a second byte that is equal to ASCII backslash
- Add psql tab completion for COPY
- Fix use of wrong version of pqsignal() in pgbench and psql
- This error could lead to misbehavior when using the -T option in pgbench or the watch command in psql, due to interrupted system calls not being resumed as expected.
- Fix misexecution of some nested if constructs in pgbench
- An if command appearing within a false -(not-being-executed) if branch was incorrectly treated the same as elif.
- In pgbench, fix possible misdisplay of progress messages during table initialization
- Make pg_controldata more robust against corrupted pg_control files
- Since pg_controldata will attempt to print the contents of pg_control even if the CRC check fails, it must take care not to misbehave for invalid field values. This patch fixes some issues triggered by invalid timestamps and apparently-negative WAL segment sizes.
- Fix possible crash in pg_dump with identity sequences attached to tables that are extension members
- Fix memory leak in pg_restore with zstd-compressed data
- The leak was per-decompression-operation, so would be most noticeable with a dump containing many tables or large objects.
- Fix pg_basebackup to correctly handle pg_wal.tar files exceeding 2GB on Windows
- Use SQL-standard function bodies in the declarations of contrib/earthdistance's SQL-language functions
- This change allows their references to contrib/cube to be resolved during extension creation, reducing the risk of search-path-based failures and possible attacks.
- In particular, this restores their usability in contexts like generated columns, for which PostgreSQL v17 restricts the search path on security grounds. We have received reports of databases failing to be upgraded to v17 because of that. This patch has been included in v16 to provide a workaround: updating the earthdistance extension to this version beforehand should allow an upgrade to succeed.
- Detect version mismatch between contrib/pageinspect's SQL declarations and the underlying shared library
- Previously, such a mismatch could result in a crash while calling brin_page_items(). Instead throw an error recommending updating the extension.
- When trying to cancel a remote query in contrib/postgres_fdw, re-issue the cancel request a few times if it didn't seem to do anything
- This fixes a race condition where we might try to cancel a just-sent query before the remote server has started to process it, so that the initial cancel request is ignored.
- Update configuration probes that determine the compiler switches needed to access ARM CRC instructions
- On ARM platforms where the baseline CPU target lacks CRC instructions, we need to supply a -march switch to persuade the compiler to compile such instructions. Recent versions of gcc reject the value we were trying, leading to silently falling back to software CRC.
- Fix meson build system to support old OpenSSL libraries on Windows
- Add support for the legacy library names ssleay32 and libeay32.
- In Windows builds using meson, ensure all libcommon and libpgport functions are exported
- This fixes “unresolved external symbol” build errors for extensions.
- Fix meson configuration process to correctly detect OSSP's uuid.h header file under MSVC
- When building with meson, install pgevent in pkglibdir not bindir
- This matches the behavior of the make-based build system and the old MSVC build system.
- When building with meson, install sepgsql.sql under share/contrib/ not share/extension/
- This matches what the make-based build system does.
- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2025a for DST law changes in Paraguay, plus historical corrections for the Philippines