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
2023-11-09
11.22 HistoricalSupport ends 2023-11-09
| CVE / issue | Severity | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2023-5869 Detect integer overflow while computing new array dimensions | 8.8 | 11.22 |
| CVE-2023-5868 Fix handling of unknown-type arguments in DISTINCT "any" aggregate functions | 4.3 | 11.22 |
| CVE-2023-5870 Prevent the pg_signal_backend role from signalling background workers and autovacuum processes | 2.2 | 11.22 |
A dump/restore is not required for those running 11.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 11.21, see Section E.2.
Changes
Fix handling of unknown-type arguments in DISTINCT "any" aggregate functions (Tom Lane)
This error led to a text-type value being interpreted as an unknown-type value (that is, a zero-terminated string) at runtime. This could result in disclosure of server memory following the text value.
The PostgreSQL Project thanks Jingzhou Fu for reporting this problem. (CVE-2023-5868)
“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 integer overflow while computing new array dimensions (Tom Lane)
When assigning new elements to array subscripts that are outside the current array bounds, an undetected integer overflow could occur in edge cases. Memory stomps that are potentially exploitable for arbitrary code execution are possible, and so is disclosure of server memory.
The PostgreSQL Project thanks Pedro Gallegos for reporting this problem. (CVE-2023-5869)
“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 the pg_signal_backend role from signalling background workers and autovacuum processes (Noah Misch, Jelte Fennema-Nio)
The documentation says that pg_signal_backend cannot issue signals to superuser-owned processes. It was able to signal these background processes, though, because they advertise a role OID of zero. Treat that as indicating superuser ownership. The security implications of cancelling one of these process types are fairly small so far as the core code goes (we'll just start another one), but extensions might add background workers that are more vulnerable.
Also ensure that the is_superuser parameter is set correctly in such processes. No specific security consequences are known for that oversight, but it might be significant for some extensions.
The PostgreSQL Project thanks Hemanth Sandrana and Mahendrakar Srinivasarao for reporting this problem. (CVE-2023-5870)
“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 partition step generation and runtime partition pruning for hash-partitioned tables with multiple partition keys (David Rowley)
Some cases involving an IS NULL condition on one of the partition keys could result in 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
Fix edge case in btree mark/restore processing of ScalarArrayOpExpr clauses (Peter Geoghegan)
When restoring an indexscan to a previously marked position, the code could miss required setup steps if the scan had advanced exactly to the end of the matches for a ScalarArrayOpExpr (that is, an indexcol = ANY(ARRAY[])) clause. This could result in missing some rows that should have been fetched.
“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 intra-query memory leak when a set-returning function repeatedly returns zero rows (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
Don't crash if cursor_to_xmlschema() is applied to a non-data-returning Portal (Boyu Yang)
“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
Handle invalid indexes more cleanly in assorted SQL functions (Noah Misch)
Report an error if pgstatindex(), pgstatginindex(), pgstathashindex(), or pgstattuple() is applied to an invalid index. If brin_desummarize_range(), brin_summarize_new_values(), brin_summarize_range(), or gin_clean_pending_list() is applied to an invalid index, do nothing except to report a debug-level message. Formerly these functions attempted to process the index, and might fail in strange ways depending on what the failed CREATE INDEX had left behind.
“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 premature memory allocation failure with long inputs to to_tsvector() (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 over-allocation of the constructed tsvector in tsvectorrecv() (Denis Erokhin)
If the incoming vector includes position data, the binary receive function left wasted space (roughly equal to the size of the position data) in the finished tsvector. In extreme cases this could lead to “maximum total lexeme length exceeded” failures for vectors that were under the length limit when emitted. In any case it could lead to wasted space on-disk.
“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 coding in gtsvector_picksplit() (Alexander Lakhin)
This could lead to poor page-split decisions in GiST indexes on tsvector columns.
“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 we have a snapshot while dropping ON COMMIT DROP temp tables (Tom Lane)
This prevents possible misbehavior if any catalog entries for the temp tables have fields wide enough to require toasting (such as a very complex CHECK 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
Avoid improper response to shutdown signals in child processes just forked by system() (Nathan Bossart)
This fix avoids a race condition in which a child process that has been forked off by system(), but hasn't yet exec'd the intended child program, might receive and act on a signal intended for the parent server process. That would lead to duplicate cleanup actions being performed, which will not end 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
Avoid torn reads of pg_control in relevant SQL functions (Thomas Munro)
Acquire the appropriate lock before reading pg_control, to ensure we get a consistent view of that file.
“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
Track the dependencies of cached CALL statements, and re-plan them when needed (Tom Lane)
DDL commands, such as replacement of a function that has been inlined into a CALL argument, can create the need to re-plan a CALL that has been cached by PL/pgSQL. That was not happening, leading to misbehavior or strange errors such as “cache lookup failed”.
“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
Track nesting depth correctly when inspecting RECORD-type Vars from outer query levels (Richard Guo)
This oversight could lead to assertion failures, core dumps, or “bogus varno” 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
Avoid “record type has not been registered” failure when deparsing a view that contains references to fields of composite constants (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 extracting fields from a RECORD-type ROW() expression (Tom Lane)
SQL code that knows that we name such fields f1, f2, etc can use those names to extract fields from the expression. This change was originally made in version 13, and is now being back-patched into older branches to support tests for a related 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
Fix error-handling bug in RECORD type cache management (Thomas Munro)
An out-of-memory error occurring at just the wrong point could leave behind inconsistent state that would lead to an infinite loop.
“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 assertion failure when logical decoding is retried in the same session after an error (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
Avoid doing plan cache revalidation of utility statements that do not receive interesting processing during parse analysis (Tom Lane)
Aside from saving a few cycles, this prevents failure after a cache invalidation for statements that must not set a snapshot, such as SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL.
“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
Keep by-reference attmissingval values in a long-lived context while they are being used (Andrew Dunstan)
This avoids possible use of dangling pointers when a tuple slot outlives the tuple descriptor with which its value was constructed.
“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
Recalculate the effective value of search_path after ALTER ROLE (Jeff Davis)
This ensures that after renaming a role, the meaning of the special string $user is re-determined.
“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 operations in GenericXLogFinish (Jeff Davis)
This code violated the conditions required for crash safety by writing WAL before marking changed buffers dirty. No core code uses this function, but extensions do (contrib/bloom does, for example).
“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 incorrect assertion in PL/Python exception handling (Alexander Lakhin)
“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_restore so that selective restores will include both table-level and column-level ACLs for selected tables (Euler Taveira, Tom Lane)
Formerly, only the table-level ACL would get restored if both types were present.
“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 invalid temporary slot names in pg_basebackup (Jelte Fennema)
This has only been seen to occur when the server connection runs through pgbouncer.
“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 contrib/amcheck, do not report interrupted page deletion as corruption (Noah Misch)
This fix prevents false-positive reports of “the first child of leftmost target page is not leftmost of its level”, “block NNNN is not leftmost” or “left link/right link pair in index XXXX not in agreement”. They appeared if amcheck ran after an unfinished btree index page deletion and before VACUUM had cleaned things up.
“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 of contrib/btree_gin indexes on interval columns, when an indexscan using the < or <= operator is performed (Dean Rasheed)
Such an indexscan failed to return all the entries it should.
“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
Suppress assorted build-time warnings on recent macOS (Tom Lane)
Xcode 15 (released with macOS Sonoma) changed the linker's behavior in a way that causes many duplicate-library warnings while building PostgreSQL. These were harmless, but they're annoying so avoid citing the same libraries twice. Also remove use of the -multiply_defined suppress linker switch, which apparently has been a no-op for a long time, and is now actively complained of.
“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 PHOT (Phoenix Islands Time) from the default timezone abbreviations list (Tom Lane)
Presence of this abbreviation in the default list can cause failures on recent Debian and Ubuntu releases, as they no longer install the underlying tzdb entry by default. Since this is a made-up abbreviation for a zone with a total human population of about two dozen, it seems unlikely that anyone will miss it. If someone does, they can put it back via a custom abbreviations file.
“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.