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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
2020-11-12
13.1 HistoricalSupport ends 2025-11-13
| CVE / issue | Severity | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2020-25695 Block DECLARE CURSOR ... WITH HOLD and firing of deferred triggers within index expressions and materialized view queries | 8.8 | 13.1 |
| CVE-2020-25694 Fix usage of complex connection-string parameters in pg_dump, pg_restore, clusterdb, reindexdb, and vacuumdb | 8.1 | 13.1 |
| CVE-2020-25696 Prevent psql's \gset command from modifying specially-treated variables | 7.5 | 13.1 |
A dump/restore is not required for those running 13.X.
Changes
Block DECLARE CURSOR ... WITH HOLD and firing of deferred triggers within index expressions and materialized view queries (Noah Misch) §
This is essentially a leak in the “security restricted operation” sandbox mechanism. An attacker having permission to create non-temporary SQL objects could parlay this leak to execute arbitrary SQL code as a superuser.
The PostgreSQL Project thanks Etienne Stalmans for reporting this problem. (CVE-2020-25695)
“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 usage of complex connection-string parameters in pg_dump, pg_restore, clusterdb, reindexdb, and vacuumdb (Tom Lane) § §
The -d parameter of pg_dump and pg_restore, or the --maintenance-db parameter of the other programs mentioned, can be a “connection string” containing multiple connection parameters rather than just a database name. In cases where these programs need to initiate additional connections, such as parallel processing or processing of multiple databases, the connection string was forgotten and just the basic connection parameters (database name, host, port, and username) were used for the additional connections. This could lead to connection failures if the connection string included any other essential information, such as non-default SSL or GSS parameters. Worse, the connection might succeed but not be encrypted as intended, or be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks that the intended connection parameters would have prevented. (CVE-2020-25694)
“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
When psql's \connect command re-uses connection parameters, ensure that all non-overridden parameters from a previous connection string are re-used (Tom Lane) §
This avoids cases where reconnection might fail due to omission of relevant parameters, such as non-default SSL or GSS options. Worse, the reconnection might succeed but not be encrypted as intended, or be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks that the intended connection parameters would have prevented. This is largely the same problem as just cited for pg_dump et al, although psql's behavior is more complex since the user may intentionally override some connection parameters. (CVE-2020-25694)
“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
Prevent psql's \gset command from modifying specially-treated variables (Noah Misch) §
\gset without a prefix would overwrite whatever variables the server told it to. Thus, a compromised server could set specially-treated variables such as PROMPT1, giving the ability to execute arbitrary shell code in the user's session.
The PostgreSQL Project thanks Nick Cleaton for reporting this problem. (CVE-2020-25696)
“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 unintended breakage of the replication protocol (Álvaro Herrera) § §
A walsender reports two command-completion events for START_REPLICATION. This was undocumented and apparently unintentional; so we failed to notice that a late 13.0 change removed the duplicate event. However it turns out that walreceivers require the extra event in some code paths. The most practical fix is to decree that the extra event is part of the protocol and resume generating it.
Changes
Ensure that SLRU directories are properly fsync'd during checkpoints (Thomas Munro) §
This prevents possible data loss in a subsequent operating system crash.
“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 ALTER ROLE for users with the BYPASSRLS attribute (Tom Lane, Stephen Frost) §
The BYPASSRLS attribute is only allowed to be changed by superusers, but other ALTER ROLE operations, such as password changes, should be allowed with only ordinary permission checks. The previous coding erroneously restricted all changes on such a role to superusers.
“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 ALTER TABLE ONLY ... DROP EXPRESSION when there are child tables (Peter Eisentraut) §
The current implementation cannot handle this case correctly, so just forbid it for now.
Changes
Ensure that ALTER TABLE ONLY ... ENABLE/DISABLE TRIGGER does not recurse to child tables (Álvaro Herrera) §
Previously the ONLY flag was ignored.
“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 LOCK TABLE to succeed on a self-referential view (Tom Lane) §
It previously threw an error complaining about infinite recursion, but there seems no need to disallow the case.
“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
Retain statistics about an index across REINDEX CONCURRENTLY (Michael Paquier, Fabrízio de Royes Mello) §
Non-concurrent reindexing has always preserved such statistics.
“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 progress reporting from REINDEX CONCURRENTLY (Matthias van de Meent, Michael Paquier) §
“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 GENERATED columns are updated when the column(s) they depend on are updated via a rule or an updatable view (Tom Lane) §
This fix also takes care of possible failure to fire a column-specific trigger in such cases.
“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 failures with collation-dependent partition bound expressions (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
Support hashing of text arrays (Peter Eisentraut) §
Array hashing failed if the array element type is collatable. Notably, this prevented using hash partitioning with a text array column as partition key.
“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
Prevent internal overflows in cross-type datetime comparisons (Nikita Glukhov, Alexander Korotkov, Tom Lane) §
Previously, comparing a date to a timestamp would fail if the date is past the valid range for timestamps. There were also corner cases involving overflow of close-to-the-limit timestamp values during timezone rotation.
Changes
Fix off-by-one conversion of negative years to BC dates in to_date() and to_timestamp() (Dar Alathar-Yemen, Tom Lane) §
Also, arrange for the combination of a negative year and an explicit “BC” marker to cancel out and produce AD.
“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 standby servers will archive WAL timeline history files when archive_mode is set to always (Grigory Smolkin, Fujii Masao) §
This oversight could lead to failure of subsequent PITR recovery 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 generating an incorrect incremental-sort plan when the sort key is a volatile expression (James Coleman) §
Changes
Fix possible crash when considering partition-wise joins during GEQO planning (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
Fix counting of the number of entries in B-tree indexes during cleanup-only VACUUMs (Peter Geoghegan) §
Changes
Ensure that data is detoasted before being inserted into a BRIN index (Tomas Vondra) §
Index entries are not supposed to contain out-of-line TOAST pointers, but BRIN didn't get that memo. This could lead to errors like “missing chunk number 0 for toast value NNN”. (If you are faced with such an error from an existing index, REINDEX should be enough to fix it.)
“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 buffered GiST index builds to work when the index has included columns (Pavel Borisov) §
“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 unportable use of getnameinfo() in pg_hba_file_rules view (Tom Lane) §
On FreeBSD 11, and possibly other platforms, the view's address and netmask columns were always null due to this error.
“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 crash if debug_query_string is NULL when starting a parallel worker (Noah Misch) §
“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 failures when a BEFORE ROW UPDATE trigger returns the “old” row of a table having dropped or “missing” columns (Amit Langote, Tom Lane) § §
This method of suppressing an update could result in crashes, unexpected CHECK constraint failures, or incorrect RETURNING output, because “missing” columns would read as NULLs for those purposes. (A column is “missing” for this purpose if it was added by ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN with a non-NULL, but constant, default value.) Dropped columns could cause trouble as well.
“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 output for incremental sort plans to have correct tag nesting in XML output mode (Daniel Gustafsson) §
Changes
Avoid unnecessary failure when transferring very large payloads through shared memory queues (Markus Wanner) §
“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 omission of result data type coercion in some cases in SQL-language functions (Tom Lane) §
This could lead to wrong results or crashes, depending on the data types involved.
Changes
Fix incorrect handling of template function attributes in JIT code generation (Andres Freund) § §
This has been shown to cause crashes on s390x, and very possibly there are other cases on other platforms.
“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 relation cache memory leaks with RLS policies (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
Fix edge-case memory leak in index_get_partition() (Justin Pryzby) §
“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 small memory leak when SIGHUP processing decides that a new GUC variable value cannot be applied without a restart (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
Fix memory leaks in PL/pgsql's CALL processing (Pavel Stehule, 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 libpq for Windows, call WSAStartup() once per process and WSACleanup() not at all (Tom Lane, Alexander Lakhin) §
Previously, libpq invoked WSAStartup() at connection start and WSACleanup() at connection cleanup. However, it appears that calling WSACleanup() can interfere with other program operations; notably, we have observed rare failures to emit expected output to stdout. There appear to be no ill effects from omitting the call, so do that. (This also eliminates a performance issue from repeated DLL loads and unloads when a program performs a series of database connections.)
“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 ecpg library's per-thread initialization logic for Windows (Tom Lane, Alexander Lakhin) §
Multi-threaded ecpg applications could suffer rare misbehavior due to incorrect locking.
“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
On Windows, make psql read the output of a backtick command in text mode, not binary mode (Tom Lane) §
This ensures proper handling of newlines.
“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 pg_dump collects per-column information about extension configuration tables (Fabrízio de Royes Mello, Tom Lane) § §
Failure to do this led to crashes when specifying --inserts, or underspecified (though usually correct) COPY commands when using COPY to reload the tables' data.
“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 pg_upgrade check for pre-existence of tablespace directories in the target cluster (Bruce Momjian) § §
“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 potential memory leak in contrib/pgcrypto (Michael Paquier) §
“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 check for an unlikely failure case in contrib/pgcrypto (Daniel Gustafsson) §
“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 recently-added timetz test case so it works when the USA is not observing daylight savings time (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
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2020d for DST law changes in Fiji, Morocco, Palestine, the Canadian Yukon, Macquarie Island, and Casey Station (Antarctica); plus historical corrections for France, Hungary, Monaco, and Palestine. (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
Sync our copy of the timezone library with IANA tzcode release 2020d (Tom Lane) § §
This absorbs upstream's change of zic's default output option from “fat” to “slim”. That's just cosmetic for our purposes, as we continue to select the “fat” mode in pre-v13 branches. This change also ensures that strftime() does not change errno unless it fails.
“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.