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
2023-08-10
11.21 HistoricalSupport ends 2023-11-09
| CVE / issue | Severity | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2023-39417 Disallow substituting a schema or owner name into an extension script if the name contains a quote, backslash, or dollar sign | 7.5 | 11.21 |
A dump/restore is not required for those running 11.X.
However, if you use BRIN indexes, it may be advisable to reindex them; see the second changelog entry below.
Also, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 11.14, see Section E.9.
Changes
Disallow substituting a schema or owner name into an extension script if the name contains a quote, backslash, or dollar sign (Noah Misch)
This restriction guards against SQL-injection hazards for trusted extensions.
The PostgreSQL Project thanks Micah Gate, Valerie Woolard, Tim Carey-Smith, and Christoph Berg for reporting this problem. (CVE-2023-39417)
“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 between empty (no rows) ranges and all-NULL ranges in BRIN indexes, as well as incorrect merging of all-NULL summaries (Tomas Vondra)
Each of these oversights could result in forgetting that a BRIN index range contains any NULL values, potentially allowing subsequent queries that should return NULL values to miss doing so.
This fix will not in itself correct faulty BRIN entries. It's recommended to REINDEX any BRIN indexes that may be used to search for nulls.
“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 leaving a corrupted database behind when DROP DATABASE is interrupted (Andres Freund)
If DROP DATABASE was interrupted after it had already begun taking irreversible steps, the target database remained accessible (because the removal of its pg_database row would roll back), but it would have corrupt contents. Fix by marking the database as inaccessible before we begin to perform irreversible operations. A failure after that will leave the database still partially present, but nothing can be done with it except to issue another DROP DATABASE.
“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 partitioned indexes are correctly marked as valid or not at creation (Michael Paquier)
If a new partitioned index matches an existing but invalid index on one of the partitions, the partitioned index could end up being marked valid prematurely. This could lead to misbehavior or assertion failures in subsequent queries on the partitioned 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
Ignore invalid child indexes when matching partitioned indexes to child indexes during ALTER TABLE ATTACH PARTITION (Michael Paquier)
Such an index will now be ignored, and a new child index created 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 possible failure when marking a partitioned index valid after all of its partitions have been attached (Michael Paquier)
The update of the index's pg_index entry could use stale data for other columns. One reported symptom is an “attempted to update invisible tuple” 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
Fix ALTER EXTENSION SET SCHEMA to complain if the extension contains any objects outside the extension's schema (Michael Paquier, Heikki Linnakangas)
Erroring out if the extension contains objects in multiple schemas was always intended; but the check was mis-coded so that it would fail to detect some cases, leading to surprising behavior.
“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
Don't use partial unique indexes for uniqueness proofs in the planner (David Rowley)
This could give rise to incorrect plans, since the presumed uniqueness of rows read from a table might not hold if the index in question isn't used to scan the 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
Avoid producing incorrect plans for foreign joins with pseudoconstant join clauses (Etsuro Fujita)
The planner currently lacks support for attaching pseudoconstant join clauses to a pushed-down remote join, so disable generation of remote joins in such cases. (A better solution will require ABI-breaking changes of planner data structures, so it will have to wait for a future major release.)
“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 handle sub-SELECTs in RLS policy expressions and security-barrier views when expanding rule actions (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 race conditions in conflict detection for SERIALIZABLE isolation mode (Thomas Munro)
Conflicts could be missed when using bitmap heap scans, when using GIN indexes, and when examining an initially-empty btree index. All these cases could lead to serializability failures due to improperly allowing conflicting transactions to commit.
“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 intermittent failures when trying to update a field of a composite column (Tom Lane)
If the overall value of the composite column is wide enough to require out-of-line toasting, then an unluckily-timed cache flush could cause errors or server 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
Prevent stack-overflow crashes with very complex text search patterns (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 tokens up to 10240 bytes long in pg_hba.conf and pg_ident.conf (Tom Lane)
The previous limit of 256 bytes has been found insufficient for some use-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 mishandling of C++ out-of-memory conditions (Heikki Linnakangas)
If JIT is in use, running out of memory in a C++ new call would lead to a PostgreSQL FATAL error, instead of the expected C++ exception.
“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 losing track of possibly-useful shared memory segments when a page free results in coalescing ranges of free space (Dongming Liu)
Ensure that the segment is moved into the appropriate “bin” for its new amount of free space, so that it will be found by subsequent searches.
“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 VACUUM to continue after detecting certain types of b-tree index corruption (Peter Geoghegan)
If an invalid sibling-page link is detected, log the issue and press on, rather than throwing an error as before. Nothing short of REINDEX will fix the broken index, but preventing VACUUM from completing until that is done risks making matters far worse.
“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 WrapLimitsVacuumLock is released after VACUUM detects invalid data in pg_database.datfrozenxid or pg_database.datminmxid (Andres Freund)
Failure to release this lock could lead to a deadlock later, although the lock would be cleaned up if the session exits or encounters some other 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 double replay of prepared transactions during crash recovery (suyu.cmj, Michael Paquier)
After a crash partway through a checkpoint with some two-phase transaction state data already flushed to disk by this checkpoint, crash recovery could attempt to replay the prepared transaction(s) twice, leading to a fatal error such as “lock is already held” in the startup process.
“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 a newly created, but still empty table is fsync'ed at the next checkpoint (Heikki Linnakangas)
Without this, if there is an operating system crash causing the empty file to disappear, subsequent operations on the table might fail with “could not open file” 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
Ensure that creation of the init fork of an unlogged index is WAL-logged (Heikki Linnakangas)
While an unlogged index's main data fork is not WAL-logged, its init fork should be, to ensure that we have a consistent state to restore the index to after a crash. This step was missed if the init fork contains no data, which is a case not used by any standard index AM; but perhaps some extension behaves that way.
“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 missing reinitializations of delay-checkpoint-end flags (suyu.cmj)
This could result in unnecessary delays of checkpoints, or in assertion failures in assert-enabled builds.
“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 assertion failure when processing an empty statement via the extended query protocol in an already-aborted transaction (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 contrib/fuzzystrmatch's Soundex difference() function to handle empty input sanely (Alexander Lakhin, Tom Lane)
An input string containing no alphabetic characters resulted in unpredictable output.
“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
Tighten whitespace checks in contrib/hstore input (Evan Jones)
In some cases, characters would be falsely recognized as whitespace and hence discarded.
“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 oversize input arrays with contrib/intarray's gist__int_ops index opclass (Ankit Kumar Pandey, Alexander Lakhin)
Previously this code would report a NOTICE but press on anyway, creating an invalid index entry that presents a risk of crashes when the index is read.
“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 useless double decompression of GiST index entries in contrib/intarray (Konstantin Knizhnik, Matthias van de Meent, 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 pg_index.indisreplident is kept up-to-date in relation cache entries (Shruthi Gowda)
This value could be stale in some cases. There is no core code that relies on the relation cache's copy, so this is only a latent bug as far as Postgres itself is concerned; but there may be extensions for which it is a live bug.
“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
Silence deprecation warnings when compiling with OpenSSL 3.0.0 or later (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.
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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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