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
2022-08-11
13.8 HistoricalSupport ends 2025-11-13
| CVE / issue | Severity | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2022-1552 Fix permissions checks in CREATE INDEX | 8.8 | 13.7 |
| CVE-2022-2625 Do not let extension scripts replace objects not already belonging to the extension | 7.1 | 13.8 |
A dump/restore is not required for those running 13.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 13.7, see Section E.17.
Changes
Do not let extension scripts replace objects not already belonging to the extension (Tom Lane) §
This change prevents extension scripts from doing CREATE OR REPLACE if there is an existing object that does not belong to the extension. It also prevents CREATE IF NOT EXISTS in the same situation. This prevents a form of trojan-horse attack in which a hostile database user could become the owner of an extension object and then modify it to compromise future uses of the object by other users. As a side benefit, it also reduces the risk of accidentally replacing objects one did not mean to.
The PostgreSQL Project thanks Sven Klemm for reporting this problem. (CVE-2022-2625)
“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 replay of CREATE DATABASE WAL records on standby servers (Kyotaro Horiguchi, Asim R Praveen, Paul Guo) § § § §
Standby servers may encounter missing tablespace directories when replaying database-creation WAL records. Prior to this patch, a standby would fail to recover in such a case; however, such directories could be legitimately missing. Create the tablespace (as a plain directory), then check that it has been dropped again once replay reaches a consistent state.
“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 “in place” tablespaces (Thomas Munro, Michael Paquier, Álvaro Herrera) §
Normally a Postgres tablespace is a symbolic link to a directory on some other filesystem. This change allows it to just be a plain directory. While this has no use for separating tables onto different filesystems, it is a convenient setup for testing. Moreover, it is necessary to support the CREATE DATABASE replay fix, which transiently creates a missing tablespace as an “in place” tablespace.
“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 permissions checks in CREATE INDEX (Nathan Bossart, Noah Misch) §
The fix for CVE-2022-1552 caused CREATE INDEX to apply the table owner's permissions while performing lookups of operator classes and other objects, where formerly the calling user's permissions were used. This broke dump/restore scenarios, because pg_dump issues CREATE INDEX before re-granting permissions.
“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 extended query protocol, force an immediate commit after CREATE DATABASE and other commands that can't run in a transaction block (Tom Lane) §
If the client does not send a Sync message immediately after such a command, but instead sends another command, any failure in that command would lead to rolling back the preceding command, typically leaving inconsistent state on-disk (such as a missing or extra database directory). The mechanisms intended to prevent that situation turn out to work for multiple commands in a simple-Query message, but not for a series of extended-protocol messages. To prevent inconsistency without breaking use-cases that work today, force an implicit commit after such commands.
“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 race condition when checking transaction visibility (Simon Riggs) §
TransactionIdIsInProgress could report false before the subject transaction is considered visible, leading to various misbehaviors. The race condition window is normally very narrow, but use of synchronous replication makes it much wider, because the wait for a synchronous replica happens in that window.
“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 queries in which a “whole-row variable” references the result of a function that returns a domain over composite type (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 “variable not found in subplan target list” planner error when pulling up a sub-SELECT that's referenced in a GROUPING function (Richard Guo) §
“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 plans when sorting by an expression that contains a non-top-level set-returning function (Richard Guo, 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
Avoid planner core dump with constant = ANY(array)array variable (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 ALTER TABLE ... ENABLE/DISABLE TRIGGER to handle recursion correctly for triggers on partitioned tables (Álvaro Herrera, Amit Langote) § §
In certain cases, a “trigger does not exist” failure would occur because the command would try to adjust the trigger on a child partition that doesn't have 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
Improve syntax error messages for type jsonpath (Andrew Dunstan) §
“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 pg_stat_get_subscription() from possibly returning an extra row containing garbage values (Kuntal Ghosh) §
“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_stop_backup() cleans up session state properly (Fujii Masao) §
This omission could lead to assertion failures or crashes later in the session.
“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 join alias matching in FOR [KEY] UPDATE/SHARE clauses (Dean Rasheed) §
In corner cases, a misleading error could be 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
Avoid crashing if too many column aliases are attached to an XMLTABLE or JSON_TABLE construct (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
Reject ROW() expressions and functions in FROM that have too many columns (Tom Lane) § §
Cases with more than about 1600 columns are unsupported, and have always failed at execution. However, it emerges that some earlier code could be driven to assertion failures or crashes by queries with more than 32K columns. Add a parse-time check to prevent that.
“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 decompiling a view or rule, show a SELECT output column's AS "?column?" alias clause if it could be referenced elsewhere (Tom Lane) §
Previously, this auto-generated alias was always hidden; but there are corner cases where doing so results in a non-restorable view or rule definition.
“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 dumping of a view using a function in FROM that returns a composite type, when column(s) of the composite type have been dropped since the view was made (Tom Lane) §
This oversight could lead to dump/reload or pg_upgrade failures, as the dumped view would have too many column aliases for the function.
“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
Report implicitly-created operator families to event triggers (Masahiko Sawada) §
If CREATE OPERATOR CLASS results in the implicit creation of an operator family, that object was not reported to event triggers that should capture such events.
“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 control file updates made when a restartpoint is running during promotion of a standby server (Kyotaro Horiguchi) §
Previously, when the restartpoint completed it could incorrectly update the last-checkpoint fields of the control file, potentially leading to PANIC and failure to restart if the server crashes before the next normal checkpoint completes.
“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 triggering of standby's wal_receiver_timeout during logical replication of large transactions (Wang Wei, Amit Kapila) §
If a large transaction on the primary server sends no data to the standby (perhaps because no table it changes is published), it was possible for the standby to timeout. Fix that by ensuring we send keepalive messages periodically in such situations.
“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 nested backup operations in logical replication walsenders (Fujii Masao) §
“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 leak in logical replication subscribers (Hou Zhijie) §
“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 logical replication's checking of replica identity when the target table is partitioned (Shi Yu, Hou Zhijie) § §
The replica identity columns have to be re-identified for the child partition.
“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 to update cached schema data in a logical replication subscriber after a schema change on the publisher (Shi Yu, Hou Zhijie) § §
“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 open-file leak when reading an invalid timezone abbreviation file (Kyotaro Horiguchi) §
Such cases could result in harmless warning messages.
“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 custom server parameters to have short descriptions that are NULL (Steve Chavez) §
Previously, although extensions could choose to create such settings, some code paths would crash while processing them.
“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
“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 erroneous assertion checks in shared hashtable management (Thomas Munro) §
“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
Arrange to clean up after commit-time errors within SPI_commit(), rather than expecting callers to do that (Peter Eisentraut, Tom Lane) § §
Proper cleanup is complicated and requires use of low-level facilities, so it's not surprising that no known caller got it right. This led to misbehaviors when a PL procedure issued COMMIT but a failure occurred (such as a deferred constraint check). To improve matters, redefine SPI_commit() as starting a new transaction, so that it becomes equivalent to SPI_commit_and_chain() except that you get default transaction characteristics instead of preserving the prior transaction's characteristics. To make this somewhat transparent API-wise, redefine SPI_start_transaction() as a no-op. All known callers of SPI_commit() immediately call SPI_start_transaction(), so they will not notice any change. Similar remarks apply to SPI_rollback().
Also fix PL/Python, which omitted any handling of such errors at all, resulting in jumping out of the Python interpreter. This is reported to crash Python 3.11. Older Python releases leak some memory but seem okay with it otherwise.
“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
Remove misguided SSL key file ownership check in libpq (Tom Lane) §
In the previous minor releases, we copied the server's permission checking rules for SSL private key files into libpq. But we should not have also copied the server's file-ownership check. While that works in normal use-cases, it can result in an unexpected failure for clients running as root, and perhaps in other 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
Ensure ecpg reports server connection loss sanely (Tom Lane) §
Misprocessing of a libpq-generated error result, such as a report of lost connection, would lead to printing “(null)” instead of a useful error message; or in older releases it would lead to a 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
Avoid core dump in ecpglib with unexpected orders of operations (Tom Lane) §
Certain operations such as EXEC SQL PREPARE would crash (rather than reporting an error as expected) if called before establishing any database connection.
“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 ecpglib, avoid redundant newlocale() calls (Noah Misch) § §
Allocate a C locale object once per process when first connecting, rather than creating and freeing locale objects once per query. This mitigates a libc memory leak on AIX, and may offer some performance benefit everywhere.
“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 psql's \watch command, echo a newline after cancellation with control-C (Pavel Stehule) §
This prevents libedit (and possibly also libreadline) from becoming confused about which column the cursor is in.
“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 possible report of wrong error condition after clone() failure in pg_upgrade with --clone option (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 contrib/pg_stat_statements to avoid problems with very large query-text files on 32-bit platforms (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 contrib/postgres_fdw sends constants of regconfig and other reg* types with proper schema qualification (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
Block signals while allocating dynamic shared memory on Linux (Thomas Munro) § § §
This avoids problems when a signal interrupts posix_fallocate().
“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 unexpected EEXIST error from shm_open() (Thomas Munro) §
This avoids a possible crash on Solaris.
“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
Adjust PL/Perl test case so it will work under Perl 5.36 (Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker) §
“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 incorrectly using an out-of-date libldap_r library when multiple OpenLDAP installations are present while building PostgreSQL (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.
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