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
2016-02-11
9.2.15 HistoricalSupport ends 2017-11-09
| CVE / issue | Severity | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2016-0773 Fix infinite loops and buffer-overrun problems in regular expressions | 6.5 | 9.2.15 |
| CVE-2016-0766 Prevent certain PL/Java parameters from being set by non-superusers | ||
| CVE-2015-7499 Add variant regression test expected-output file to match behavior of current libxml2 | ||
| CVE-2007-4772 Fix regular-expression compiler to handle loops of constraint arcs |
A dump/restore is not required for those running 9.2.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 9.2.11, see Section E.14.
Changes
Fix infinite loops and buffer-overrun problems in regular expressions (Tom Lane)
Very large character ranges in bracket expressions could cause infinite loops in some cases, and memory overwrites in other cases. (CVE-2016-0773)
“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
Perform an immediate shutdown if the postmaster.pid file is removed (Tom Lane)
The postmaster now checks every minute or so that postmaster.pid is still there and still contains its own PID. If not, it performs an immediate shutdown, as though it had received SIGQUIT. The main motivation for this change is to ensure that failed buildfarm runs will get cleaned up without manual intervention; but it also serves to limit the bad effects if a DBA forcibly removes postmaster.pid and then starts a new postmaster.
“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 SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation mode, serialization anomalies could be missed due to race conditions during insertions (Kevin Grittner, 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
Fix failure to emit appropriate WAL records when doing ALTER TABLE ... SET TABLESPACE for unlogged relations (Michael Paquier, Andres Freund)
Even though the relation's data is unlogged, the move must be logged or the relation will be inaccessible after a standby is promoted to master.
“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 misinitialization of unlogged relations at the end of crash recovery (Andres Freund, 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
Fix ALTER COLUMN TYPE to reconstruct inherited check constraints properly (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 REASSIGN OWNED to change ownership of composite types properly (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 REASSIGN OWNED and ALTER OWNER to correctly update granted-permissions lists when changing owners of data types, foreign data wrappers, or foreign servers (Bruce Momjian, 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 REASSIGN OWNED to ignore foreign user mappings, rather than fail (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
Add more defenses against bad planner cost estimates for GIN index scans when the index's internal statistics are very out-of-date (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
Make planner cope with hypothetical GIN indexes suggested by an index advisor plug-in (Julien Rouhaud)
“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 whole-row Vars in ROW() and VALUES() lists (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 possible internal overflow in numeric division (Dean Rasheed)
“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 enforcement of restrictions inside parentheses within regular expression lookahead constraints (Tom Lane)
Lookahead constraints aren't allowed to contain backrefs, and parentheses within them are always considered non-capturing, according to the manual. However, the code failed to handle these cases properly inside a parenthesized subexpression, and would give unexpected 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
Conversion of regular expressions to indexscan bounds could produce incorrect bounds from regexps containing lookahead constraints (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 regular-expression compiler to handle loops of constraint arcs (Tom Lane)
The code added for CVE-2007-4772 was both incomplete, in that it didn't handle loops involving more than one state, and incorrect, in that it could cause assertion failures (though there seem to be no bad consequences of that in a non-assert build). Multi-state loops would cause the compiler to run until the query was canceled or it reached the too-many-states error condition.
“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 memory-usage accounting in regular-expression compiler (Tom Lane)
This causes the code to emit "regular expression is too complex" errors in some cases that previously used unreasonable amounts of time and memory.
“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 performance of regular-expression compiler (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
Make %h and %r escapes in log_line_prefix work for messages emitted due to log_connections (Tom Lane)
Previously, %h/%r started to work just after a new session had emitted the "connection received" log message; now they work for that message too.
“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, ensure the shared-memory mapping handle gets closed in child processes that don't need it (Tom Lane, Amit Kapila)
This oversight resulted in failure to recover from crashes whenever logging_collector is turned on.
“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 failure to detect socket EOF in non-blocking mode on Windows (Tom Lane)
It's not entirely clear whether this problem can happen in pre-9.5 branches, but if it did, the symptom would be that a walsender process would wait indefinitely rather than noticing a loss of 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
Avoid leaking a token handle during SSPI authentication (Christian Ullrich)
“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, ensure that libreadline's idea of the screen size is updated when the terminal window size changes (Merlin Moncure)
Previously, libreadline did not notice if the window was resized during query output, leading to strange behavior during later input of multiline queries.
“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 psql's \det command to interpret its pattern argument the same way as other \d commands with potentially schema-qualified patterns do (Reece Hart)
“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 possible crash in psql's \c command when previous connection was via Unix socket and command specifies a new hostname and same username (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 pg_ctl start -w, test child process status directly rather than relying on heuristics (Tom Lane, Michael Paquier)
Previously, pg_ctl relied on an assumption that the new postmaster would always create postmaster.pid within five seconds. But that can fail on heavily-loaded systems, causing pg_ctl to report incorrectly that the postmaster failed to start.
Except on Windows, this change also means that a pg_ctl start -w done immediately after another such command will now reliably fail, whereas previously it would report success if done within two seconds of the first command.
“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 pg_ctl start -w, don't attempt to use a wildcard listen address to connect to the postmaster (Kondo Yuta)
On Windows, pg_ctl would fail to detect postmaster startup if listen_addresses is set to 0.0.0.0 or ::, because it would try to use that value verbatim as the address to connect to, which doesn't work. Instead assume that 127.0.0.1 or ::1, respectively, is the right thing to use.
“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 pg_ctl on Windows, check service status to decide where to send output, rather than checking if standard output is a terminal (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
In pg_dump and pg_basebackup, adopt the GNU convention for handling tar-archive members exceeding 8GB (Tom Lane)
The POSIX standard for tar file format does not allow archive member files to exceed 8GB, but most modern implementations of tar support an extension that fixes that. Adopt this extension so that pg_dump with -Ft no longer fails on tables with more than 8GB of data, and so that pg_basebackup can handle files larger than 8GB. In addition, fix some portability issues that could cause failures for members between 4GB and 8GB on some platforms. Potentially these problems could cause unrecoverable data loss due to unreadable backup files.
“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 assorted corner-case bugs in pg_dump's processing of extension member objects (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
Make pg_dump mark a view's triggers as needing to be processed after its rule, to prevent possible failure during parallel pg_restore (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 relation option values are properly quoted in pg_dump (Kouhei Sutou, Tom Lane)
A reloption value that isn't a simple identifier or number could lead to dump/reload failures due to syntax errors in CREATE statements issued by pg_dump. This is not an issue with any reloption currently supported by core PostgreSQL, but extensions could allow reloptions that cause the problem.
“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_upgrade's file-copying code to handle errors properly on Windows (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
Install guards in pgbench against corner-case overflow conditions during evaluation of script-specified division or modulo operators (Fabien Coelho, 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
Fix failure to localize messages emitted by pg_receivexlog and pg_recvlogical (Ioseph Kim)
“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 dump/reload problems when using both plpython2 and plpython3 (Tom Lane)
In principle, both versions of PL/Python can be used in the same database, though not in the same session (because the two versions of libpython cannot safely be used concurrently). However, pg_restore and pg_upgrade both do things that can fall foul of the same-session restriction. Work around that by changing the timing of the check.
“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/Python regression tests to pass with Python 3.5 (Peter Eisentraut)
“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 certain PL/Java parameters from being set by non-superusers (Noah Misch)
This change mitigates a PL/Java security bug (CVE-2016-0766), which was fixed in PL/Java by marking these parameters as superuser-only. To fix the security hazard for sites that update PostgreSQL more frequently than PL/Java, make the core code aware of them also.
“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 libpq's handling of out-of-memory situations (Michael Paquier, Amit Kapila, 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
Fix order of arguments in ecpg-generated typedef statements (Michael Meskes)
“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
Use %g not %f format in ecpg's PGTYPESnumeric_from_double() (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 ecpg-supplied header files to not contain comments continued from a preprocessor directive line onto the next line (Michael Meskes)
Such a comment is rejected by ecpg. It's not yet clear whether ecpg itself should be changed.
“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/pgcrypto's crypt() function can be interrupted by query cancel (Andreas Karlsson)
“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
Accept flex versions later than 2.5.x (Tom Lane, Michael Paquier)
Now that flex 2.6.0 has been released, the version checks in our build scripts needed to be adjusted.
“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
Install our missing script where PGXS builds can find it (Jim Nasby)
This allows sane behavior in a PGXS build done on a machine where build tools such as bison are missing.
“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 dynloader.h is included in the installed header files in MSVC builds (Bruce Momjian, 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 variant regression test expected-output file to match behavior of current libxml2 (Tom Lane)
The fix for libxml2's CVE-2015-7499 causes it not to output error context reports in some cases where it used to do so. This seems to be a bug, but we'll probably have to live with it for some time, so work around 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
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2016a for DST law changes in Cayman Islands, Metlakatla, and Trans-Baikal Territory (Zabaykalsky Krai), plus historical corrections for Pakistan.
“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.
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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.
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