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
2017-11-09
9.6.6 HistoricalSupport ends 2021-11-11
| CVE / issue | Severity | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2017-12172 Fix sample server-start scripts to become $PGUSER before opening $PGLOG | 8.4 | 9.6.6 |
| CVE-2017-15098 Fix crash due to rowtype mismatch in json{b}_populate_recordset() | 4.3 | 9.6.6 |
| CVE-2017-15099 Ensure that INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE checks table permissions and RLS policies in all cases | 3.1 | 9.6.6 |
A dump/restore is not required for those running 9.6.X.
However, if you use BRIN indexes, see the fourth changelog entry below.
Also, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 9.6.4, see Section E.21.
Changes
Ensure that INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE checks table permissions and RLS policies in all cases (Dean Rasheed)
The update path of INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE requires SELECT permission on the columns of the arbiter index, but it failed to check for that in the case of an arbiter specified by constraint name. In addition, for a table with row level security enabled, it failed to check updated rows against the table's SELECT policies (regardless of how the arbiter index was specified). (CVE-2017-15099)
“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 due to rowtype mismatch in json{b}_populate_recordset() (Michael Paquier, Tom Lane)
These functions used the result rowtype specified in the FROM ... AS clause without checking that it matched the actual rowtype of the supplied tuple value. If it didn't, that would usually result in a crash, though disclosure of server memory contents seems possible as well. (CVE-2017-15098)
“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 sample server-start scripts to become $PGUSER before opening $PGLOG (Noah Misch)
Previously, the postmaster log file was opened while still running as root. The database owner could therefore mount an attack against another system user by making $PGLOG be a symbolic link to some other file, which would then become corrupted by appending log messages.
By default, these scripts are not installed anywhere. Users who have made use of them will need to manually recopy them, or apply the same changes to their modified versions. If the existing $PGLOG file is root-owned, it will need to be removed or renamed out of the way before restarting the server with the corrected script. (CVE-2017-12172)
“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 BRIN index summarization to handle concurrent table extension correctly (Álvaro Herrera)
Previously, a race condition allowed some table rows to be omitted from the index. It may be necessary to reindex existing BRIN indexes to recover from past occurrences of this 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 possible failures during concurrent updates of a BRIN index (Tom Lane)
These race conditions could result in errors like "invalid index offnum" or "inconsistent range map".
“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 when logical decoding is invoked from a SPI-using function, in particular any function written in a PL language (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 incorrect query results when multiple GROUPING SETS columns contain the same simple 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 incorrect parallelization decisions for nested queries (Amit Kapila, 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
Fix parallel query handling to not fail when a recently-used role is dropped (Amit Kapila)
“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 json_build_array(), json_build_object(), and their jsonb equivalents to handle explicit VARIADIC arguments correctly (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
Properly reject attempts to convert infinite float values to type numeric (Tom Lane, KaiGai Kohei)
Previously the behavior was platform-dependent.
“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 corner-case crashes when columns have been added to the end of a view (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
Record proper dependencies when a view or rule contains FieldSelect or FieldStore expression nodes (Tom Lane)
Lack of these dependencies could allow a column or data type DROP to go through when it ought to fail, thereby causing later uses of the view or rule to get errors. This patch does not do anything to protect existing views/rules, only ones created in the future.
“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
Correctly detect hashability of range data types (Tom Lane)
The planner mistakenly assumed that any range type could be hashed for use in hash joins or hash aggregation, but actually it must check whether the range's subtype has hash support. This does not affect any of the built-in range types, since they're all hashable anyway.
“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
Correctly ignore RelabelType expression nodes when determining relation distinctness (David Rowley)
This allows the intended optimization to occur when a subquery has a result column of type varchar.
“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 sharing transition states between ordered-set aggregates (David Rowley)
This causes a crash with the built-in ordered-set aggregates, and probably with user-written ones as well. v11 and later will include provisions for dealing with such cases safely, but in released branches, just disable the optimization.
“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 idle_in_transaction_session_timeout from being ignored when a statement_timeout occurred earlier (Lukas Fittl)
“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 low-probability loss of NOTIFY messages due to XID wraparound (Marko Tiikkaja, Tom Lane)
If a session executed no queries, but merely listened for notifications, for more than 2 billion transactions, it started to miss some notifications from concurrently-committing transactions.
“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 SIGBUS crash on Linux when a DSM memory request exceeds the space available in tmpfs (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
Reduce the frequency of data flush requests during bulk file copies to avoid performance problems on macOS, particularly with its new APFS file system (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
Prevent low-probability crash in processing of nested trigger firings (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
Allow COPY's FREEZE option to work when the transaction isolation level is REPEATABLE READ or higher (Noah Misch)
This case was unintentionally broken by a previous bug fix.
“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
Correctly restore the umask setting when file creation fails in COPY or lo_export() (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
Give a better error message for duplicate column names in ANALYZE (Nathan Bossart)
“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 missing cases in GetCommandLogLevel(), preventing errors when certain SQL commands are used while log_statement is set to ddl (Michael Paquier)
Changes
Fix mis-parsing of the last line in a non-newline-terminated pg_hba.conf file (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 AggGetAggref() to return the correct Aggref nodes to aggregate final functions whose transition calculations have been merged (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 pg_dump to ensure that it emits GRANT commands in a valid order (Stephen Frost)
Changes
Fix pg_basebackup's matching of tablespace paths to canonicalize both paths before comparing (Michael Paquier)
This is particularly helpful on Windows.
“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 libpq to not require user's home directory to exist (Tom Lane)
In v10, failure to find the home directory while trying to read ~/.pgpass was treated as a hard error, but it should just cause that file to not be found. Both v10 and previous release branches made the same mistake when reading ~/.pg_service.conf, though this was less obvious since that file is not sought unless a service name is specified.
“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 libpq to guard against integer overflow in the row count of a PGresult (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 ecpg's handling of out-of-scope cursor declarations with pointer or array variables (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
In ecpglib, correctly handle backslashes in string literals depending on whether standard_conforming_strings is set (Tsunakawa Takayuki)
“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 ecpglib's Informix-compatibility mode ignore fractional digits in integer input strings, as expected (Gao Zengqi, 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
Fix ecpg's regression tests to work reliably on Windows (Christian Ullrich, Michael Meskes)
Changes
Fix missing temp-install prerequisites for check-like Make targets (Noah Misch)
Some non-default test procedures that are meant to work like make check failed to ensure that the temporary installation was up to date.
“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 release tzcode2017c (Tom Lane)
This fixes various issues; the only one likely to be user-visible is that the default DST rules for a POSIX-style zone name, if no posixrules file exists in the timezone data directory, now match current US law rather than what it was a dozen years ago.
“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 2017c for DST law changes in Fiji, Namibia, Northern Cyprus, Sudan, Tonga, and Turks & Caicos Islands, plus historical corrections for Alaska, Apia, Burma, Calcutta, Detroit, Ireland, Namibia, and Pago Pago.
“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.