PostgreSQL 9.2.3 Documentation
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# E.31. Release 8.4.12

> Release Date: 2012-06-04

This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.4.11. For information about new features in the 8.4 major release, see Section E.43.

## E.31.1. Migration to Version 8.4.12

A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.4.X.

However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.4.10, see the release notes for 8.4.10.

## E.31.2. Changes

- Fix incorrect password transformation in `contrib/pgcrypto`'s DES `crypt()` function (Solar Designer)

  If a password string contained the byte value `0x80`, the remainder of the password was ignored, causing the password to be much weaker than it appeared. With this fix, the rest of the string is properly included in the DES hash. Any stored password values that are affected by this bug will thus no longer match, so the stored values may need to be updated. (CVE-2012-2143)

- Ignore `SECURITY DEFINER` and `SET` attributes for a procedural language's call handler (Tom Lane)

  Applying such attributes to a call handler could crash the server. (CVE-2012-2655)

- Allow numeric timezone offsets in `timestamp` input to be up to 16 hours away from UTC (Tom Lane)

  Some historical time zones have offsets larger than 15 hours, the previous limit. This could result in dumped data values being rejected during reload.

- Fix timestamp conversion to cope when the given time is exactly the last DST transition time for the current timezone (Tom Lane)

  This oversight has been there a long time, but was not noticed previously because most DST-using zones are presumed to have an indefinite sequence of future DST transitions.

- Fix `text` to `name` and `char` to `name` casts to perform string truncation correctly in multibyte encodings (Karl Schnaitter)

- Fix memory copying bug in `to_tsquery()` (Heikki Linnakangas)

- Fix planner's handling of outer PlaceHolderVars within subqueries (Tom Lane)

  This bug concerns sub-SELECTs that reference variables coming from the nullable side of an outer join of the surrounding query. In 9.1, queries affected by this bug would fail with "ERROR: Upper-level PlaceHolderVar found where not expected". But in 9.0 and 8.4, you'd silently get possibly-wrong answers, since the value transmitted into the subquery wouldn't go to null when it should.

- Fix slow session startup when `pg_attribute` is very large (Tom Lane)

  If `pg_attribute` exceeds one-fourth of `shared_buffers`, cache rebuilding code that is sometimes needed during session start would trigger the synchronized-scan logic, causing it to take many times longer than normal. The problem was particularly acute if many new sessions were starting at once.

- Ensure sequential scans check for query cancel reasonably often (Merlin Moncure)

  A scan encountering many consecutive pages that contain no live tuples would not respond to interrupts meanwhile.

- Ensure the Windows implementation of `PGSemaphoreLock()` clears `ImmediateInterruptOK` before returning (Tom Lane)

  This oversight meant that a query-cancel interrupt received later in the same query could be accepted at an unsafe time, with unpredictable but not good consequences.

- Show whole-row variables safely when printing views or rules (Abbas Butt, Tom Lane)

  Corner cases involving ambiguous names (that is, the name could be either a table or column name of the query) were printed in an ambiguous way, risking that the view or rule would be interpreted differently after dump and reload. Avoid the ambiguous case by attaching a no-op cast.

- Fix `COPY FROM` to properly handle null marker strings that correspond to invalid encoding (Tom Lane)

  A null marker string such as `E'\\0'` should work, and did work in the past, but the case got broken in 8.4.

- Ensure autovacuum worker processes perform stack depth checking properly (Heikki Linnakangas)

  Previously, infinite recursion in a function invoked by auto-`ANALYZE` could crash worker processes.

- Fix logging collector to not lose log coherency under high load (Andrew Dunstan)

  The collector previously could fail to reassemble large messages if it got too busy.

- Fix logging collector to ensure it will restart file rotation after receiving SIGHUP (Tom Lane)

- Fix WAL replay logic for GIN indexes to not fail if the index was subsequently dropped (Tom Lane)

- Fix memory leak in PL/pgSQL's `RETURN NEXT` command (Joe Conway)

- Fix PL/pgSQL's `GET DIAGNOSTICS` command when the target is the function's first variable (Tom Lane)

- Fix potential access off the end of memory in psql's expanded display (`\x`) mode (Peter Eisentraut)

- Fix several performance problems in pg_dump when the database contains many objects (Jeff Janes, Tom Lane)

  pg_dump could get very slow if the database contained many schemas, or if many objects are in dependency loops, or if there are many owned sequences.

- Fix `contrib/dblink`'s `dblink_exec()` to not leak temporary database connections upon error (Tom Lane)

- Fix `contrib/dblink` to report the correct connection name in error messages (Kyotaro Horiguchi)

- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2012c for DST law changes in Antarctica, Armenia, Chile, Cuba, Falkland Islands, Gaza, Haiti, Hebron, Morocco, Syria, and Tokelau Islands; also historical corrections for Canada.

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