DocumentationVersion comparison
POSTGRESQL · VERSION COMPARE
All features, fixes, and compatibility notes in this release, with related records from other versions.
Includes changes after the source version through the target. A major version name means its initial release.
From PostgreSQL 9.0 onward: 17 major branches and 352 release notes. Updated 2026-09-26.
Complete release changes
2024-05-09
12.19 HistoricalSupport ends 2024-11-21
A dump/restore is not required for those running 12.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 12.18, see Section E.5.
Changes
Fix INSERT from multiple VALUES rows into a target column that is a domain over an array or composite type (Tom Lane) §
Such cases would either fail with surprising complaints about mismatched datatypes, or insert unexpected coercions that could lead to odd results.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix incorrect pruning of NULL partition when a table is partitioned on a boolean column and the query has a boolean IS NOT clause (David Rowley) §
A NULL value satisfies a clause such as boolcol IS NOT FALSE
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Make ALTER FOREIGN TABLE SET SCHEMA move any owned sequences into the new schema (Tom Lane) §
Moving a regular table to a new schema causes any sequences owned by the table to be moved to that schema too (along with indexes and constraints). This was overlooked for foreign tables, however.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix EXPLAIN's counting of heap pages accessed by a bitmap heap scan (Melanie Plageman) §
Previously, heap pages that contain no visible tuples were not counted; but it seems more consistent to count all pages returned by the bitmap index scan.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Avoid deadlock during removal of orphaned temporary tables (Mikhail Zhilin) §
If the session that creates a temporary table crashes without removing the table, autovacuum will eventually try to remove the orphaned table. However, an incoming session that's been assigned the same temporary namespace will do that too. If a temporary table has a dependency (such as an owned sequence) then a deadlock could result between these two cleanup attempts.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Avoid race condition while examining per-relation frozen-XID values (Noah Misch) §
VACUUM's computation of per-database frozen-XID values from per-relation values could get confused by a concurrent update of those values by another VACUUM.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Disallow converting a table to a view within an outer SQL command that is using that table (Tom Lane) §
This avoids possible crashes.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Ensure that join conditions generated from equivalence classes are applied at the correct plan level (Tom Lane) §
In versions before PostgreSQL 16, it was possible for generated conditions to be evaluated below outer joins when they should be evaluated above (after) the outer join, leading to incorrect query results. All versions have a similar hazard when considering joins to UNION ALL trees that have constant outputs for the join column in some SELECT arms.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Avoid unnecessary use of moving-aggregate mode with a non-moving window frame (Vallimaharajan G) §
When a plain aggregate is used as a window function, and the window frame start is specified as UNBOUNDED PRECEDING, the frame's head cannot move so we do not need to use the special (and more expensive) moving-aggregate mode. This optimization was intended all along, but due to a coding error it never triggered.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Avoid use of already-freed data while planning partition-wise joins under GEQO (Tom Lane) §
This would typically end in a crash or unexpected error message.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix incorrectly-reported statistics kind codes in “requested statistics kind X is not yet built” error messages (David Rowley) §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Be more careful with RECORD-returning functions in FROM (Tom Lane) § §
The output columns of such a function call must be defined by an AS clause that specifies the column names and data types. If the actual function output value doesn't match that, an error is supposed to be thrown at runtime. However, some code paths would examine the actual value prematurely, and potentially issue strange errors or suffer assertion failures if it doesn't match expectations.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix confusion about the return rowtype of SQL-language procedures (Tom Lane) §
A procedure implemented in SQL language that returns a single composite-type column would cause an assertion failure or core dump.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Add protective stack depth checks to some recursive functions (Egor Chindyaskin) §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Detect integer overflow when adding or subtracting an interval to/from a timestamp (Joseph Koshakow) §
Some cases that should cause an out-of-range error produced an incorrect result instead.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Avoid race condition in pg_get_expr() (Tom Lane) §
If the relation referenced by the argument is dropped concurrently, the function's intention is to return NULL, but sometimes it failed instead.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix detection of old transaction IDs in XID status functions (Karina Litskevich) §
Transaction IDs more than 231 transactions in the past could be misidentified as recent, leading to misbehavior of pg_xact_status() or txid_status().
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix file descriptor leakage when an error is thrown while waiting in WaitEventSetWait (Etsuro Fujita) §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Throw an error if an index is accessed while it is being reindexed (Tom Lane) §
Previously this was just an assertion check, but promote it into a regular runtime error. This will provide a more on-point error message when reindexing a user-defined index expression that attempts to access its own table.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Ensure that index-only scans on name columns return a fully-padded value (David Rowley) §
The value physically stored in the index is truncated, and previously a pointer to that value was returned to callers. This provoked complaints when testing under valgrind. In theory it could result in crashes, though none have been reported.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix crash with DSM allocations larger than 4GB (Heikki Linnakangas) §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Disconnect if a new server session's client socket cannot be put into non-blocking mode (Heikki Linnakangas) §
It was once theoretically possible for us to operate with a socket that's in blocking mode; but that hasn't worked fully in a long time, so fail at connection start rather than misbehave later.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix inadequate error reporting with OpenSSL 3.0.0 and later (Heikki Linnakangas, Tom Lane) §
System-reported errors passed through by OpenSSL were reported with a numeric error code rather than anything readable.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Avoid concurrent calls to bindtextdomain() in libpq and ecpglib (Tom Lane) § §
Although GNU gettext's implementation seems to be fine with concurrent calls, the version available on Windows is not.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix crash in ecpg's preprocessor if the program tries to redefine a macro that was defined on the preprocessor command line (Tom Lane) § § §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
In ecpg, avoid issuing false “unsupported feature will be passed to server” warnings (Tom Lane) §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Ensure that the string result of ecpg's intoasc() function is correctly zero-terminated (Oleg Tselebrovskiy) §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix pg_dumpall so that role comments, if present, will be dumped regardless of the setting of --no-role-passwords (Daniel Gustafsson, Álvaro Herrera) § §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix PL/pgSQL's parsing of single-line comments (---style comments) following expressions (Erik Wienhold, Tom Lane) §
This mistake caused parse errors if such a comment followed a WHEN expression in a PL/pgSQL CASE statement.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
In contrib/amcheck, don't report false match failures due to short- versus long-header values (Andrey Borodin, Michael Zhilin) § §
A variable-length datum in a heap tuple or index tuple could have either a short or a long header, depending on compression parameters that applied when it was made. Treat these cases as equivalent rather than complaining if there's a difference.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
In contrib/postgres_fdw, avoid emitting requests to sort by a constant (David Rowley) §
This could occur in cases involving UNION ALL with constant-emitting subqueries. Sorting by a constant is useless of course, but it also risks being misinterpreted by the remote server, leading to “ORDER BY position N is not in select list” errors.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Make contrib/postgres_fdw set the remote session's time zone to GMT not UTC (Tom Lane) §
This should have the same results for practical purposes. However, GMT is recognized by hard-wired code in the server, while UTC is looked up in the timezone database. So the old code could fail in the unlikely event that the remote server's timezone database is missing entries.
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
In contrib/xml2, avoid use of library functions that have been deprecated in recent versions of libxml2 (Dmitry Koval) §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Fix incompatibility with LLVM 18 (Thomas Munro, Dmitry Dolgov) §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
Changes
Allow make check to work with the musl C library (Thomas Munro, Bruce Momjian, Tom Lane) §
“Same change” requires complete matching evidence. “Related commits” can cover independent changes, a partial backport, or a follow-up correction; each release keeps its own explanation.
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The comparison follows PostgreSQL release notes from just after the source through the target version. For a major upgrade, maintenance releases from each older branch are included only up to the next major release date, and never after the target date. A major version such as 18 means its initial release, 18.0. Previews and development snapshots are labeled separately.
Entries come from the original English manuals. Release coverage and commit evidence are verified against upstream sources. Every entry retains its complete explanation and source link. Categories aid browsing; read the full notes for impact, conditions, and migration steps.
Fixes can be backported to several branches. Confirmed duplicates are merged conservatively, with every branch explanation retained. A note describing several independent fixes is excluded only when all are already present in the source. Major-release features remain distinct from related maintenance patches unless their complete original descriptions match. Uncertain matches are retained. This is a release-note history, not an exhaustive comparison of compiled binaries.
CVE results are calculated independently from the PostgreSQL security registry and vulnerability records. A CVE counts as gained protection only when the source is affected and the target is fixed or unaffected. Remaining vulnerabilities are listed separately. Security entries and distinct CVEs are counted separately.
Interaction inspired by pgversions.com and pgversionreport. Content comes from PostgreSQL release notes. See the release notes archive.