Download PostgreSQL 8.2.4

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group released version 8.2.4 of PostgreSQL a few days ago. This popular open source Relational Database Management System runs on a large number of operating systems and is therefore very suitable for various environments. There is no need to perform a dump/restore if an 8.2.x version is already being used. The list of changes since the previous entry in the junk tracker looks like this:

Version 8.2.4:

• Support explicit placement of the temporary-table schema within search_path, and disable searching it for functions and operators (Tom)
  This is needed to allow a security-definer function to set a truly secure value of search_path. Without it, an unprivileged SQL user can use temporary objects to execute code with the privileges of the security-definer function (CVE-2007-2138). See CREATE FUNCTION for more information.
• Fix shared_preload_libraries for Windows by forcing reload in each backend (Korry Douglas)
• Fix to_char() so it properly upper/lower cases localized day or month names (Pavel Stehule)
• /contrib/tsearch2 crash fixes (Teodor)
• Require COMMIT PREPARED to be executed in the same database as the transaction was prepared in (Heikki)
• Allow pg_dump to do binary backups larger than two gigabytes on Windows (Magnus)
• New traditional (Taiwan) Chinese FAQ (Zhou Daojing)
• Prevent the statistics collector from writing to disk too frequently (Tom)
• Fix potential-data-corruption bug in how VACUUM FULL handles UPDATE chains (Tom, Pavan Deolasee)
• Fix bug in domains that use array types (Tom)
• Fix pg_dump so it can dump a serial column’s sequence using -t when not also dumping the owning table (Tom)
• Planner fixes, including improving outer join and bitmap scan selection logic (Tom)
• Fix possible wrong answers or crash when a PL/pgSQL function tries to RETURN from within an EXCEPTION block (Tom)
• Fix PANIC during enlargement of a hash index (Tom)
• Fix POSIX-style timezone specs to follow new USA DST rules (Tom)

Version 8.2.3:

• Remove overly-restrictive check for type length in constraints and functional indexes(Tom)
• Fix optimization so MIN/MAX in subqueries can again use indexes (Tom)

Version 8.2.2:

• Remove security vulnerabilities that allowed connected users to read backend memory (Tom)
  The vulnerabilities involve suppressing the normal check that a SQL function returns the data type it’s declared to, and changing the data type of a table column (CVE-2007-0555, CVE-2007-0556). These errors can easily be exploited to cause a backend crash, and in principle might be used to read database content that the user should not be able to access.
• Fix not-so-rare-anymore bug wherein btree index page splits could fail due to choosing an infeasible split point (Heikki Linnakangas)
• Fix Borland C compile scripts (L Bayuk)
• Properly handle to_char(‘CC’) for years ending in 00 (Tom)
  Year 2000 is in the twentieth century, not the twenty-first.
• /contrib/tsearch2 localization improvements (Tatsuo, Teodor)
• Fix incorrect permission check in information_schema.key_column_usage view (Tom)
  The symptom is “relation with OID nnnnn does not exist” errors. To get this fix without using initdb, use CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW to install the corrected definition found in share/information_schema.sql. Note you will need to do this in each database.
• Improve VACUUM performance for databases with many tables (Tom)
• Fix for rare Assert() crash triggered by UNION (Tom)
• Fix potentially incorrect results from index searches using ROW inequality conditions (Tom)
• Tighten security of multi-byte character processing for UTF8 sequences over three bytes long (Tom)
• Fix bogus “permission denied” failures occurring on Windows due to attempts to fsync already-deleted files (Magnus, Tom)
• Fix bug that could cause the statistics collector to hang on Windows (Magnus)
  This would in turn lead to autovacuum not working.
• Fix possible crashes when an already-in-use PL/pgSQL function is updated (Tom)
• Improve PL/pgSQL handling of domain types (Sergiy Vyshnevetskiy, Tom)
• Fix possible errors in processing PL/pgSQL exception blocks (Tom)