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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
2020-05-14
12.3 HistoricalSupport ends 2024-11-21
A dump/restore is not required for those running 12.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 12.2, see Section E.21.
Changes
Fix possible failure with GENERATED columns (David Rowley) §
If a GENERATED column's value is an exact copy of another column of the table (and it is a pass-by-reference data type), it was possible to crash or insert corrupted data into the table. While it would be rather pointless for a GENERATED expression to just duplicate another column, an expression using a function that sometimes returns its input unchanged could create the situation.
Changes
Handle inheritance of generated columns better (Peter Eisentraut) §
When a table column is inherited during CREATE TABLE ... INHERITS, disallow changing any generation properties when the parent column is already marked GENERATED; but allow a child column to be marked GENERATED when its parent is not.
Changes
Fix cross-column references in CREATE TABLE LIKE INCLUDING GENERATED (Peter Eisentraut) §
CREATE TABLE ... LIKE failed when trying to copy a GENERATED expression that references a physically-later column.
Changes
Propagate ALTER TABLE ... SET STORAGE to indexes (Peter Eisentraut) §
Non-expression index columns have always copied the attstorage property of their table column at creation. Update them when ALTER TABLE ... SET STORAGE is done, to maintain consistency.
“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
Preserve the indisclustered setting of indexes rewritten by ALTER TABLE (Amit Langote, Justin Pryzby) §
Previously, ALTER TABLE lost track of which index had been used for CLUSTER.
“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
Preserve the replica identity properties of indexes rewritten by ALTER TABLE (Quan Zongliang, 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
Preserve the indisclustered setting of indexes rebuilt by REINDEX CONCURRENTLY (Justin Pryzby) §
Changes
Lock objects sooner during DROP OWNED BY (Álvaro Herrera) §
This avoids failures in race-condition cases where another session is deleting some of the same objects.
“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-case processing for CREATE ROLE ... IN ROLE (Andrew Gierth) §
Some error cases would be reported as “unexpected node type” or the like, instead of the intended message.
“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 when a partition is detached, any triggers cloned from its formerly-parent table are removed (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 crash when COLLATE is applied to a non-collatable type in a partition bound expression (Dmitry Dolgov) §
Changes
Ensure that unique indexes over partitioned tables match the equality semantics of the partitioning key (Guancheng Luo) §
This would only be an issue with index opclasses that have unusual notions of equality, but it's wrong in theory, so 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
Ensure that members of the pg_read_all_stats role can read all statistics views, as expected (Magnus Hagander) §
The functions underlying the pg_stat_progress_* views had not gotten this memo.
“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
Repair performance regression in information_schema.triggers view (Tom Lane) §
This patch redefines that view so that an outer WHERE clause constraining the table name can be pushed down into the view, allowing its calculations to be done only for triggers belonging to the table of interest rather than all triggers in the database. In a database with many triggers this would make a significant speed difference for queries of that form. Since things worked that way before v11, this is a potential performance regression. Users who find this to be a problem can fix it by replacing the view definition (or, perhaps, just deleting and reinstalling the whole information_schema schema).
“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
Repair performance regression in floating point overflow/underflow detection (Emre Hasegeli) §
Previous refactoring had resulted in isinf() being called extra times in some hot code paths.
Changes
Fix full text search to handle NOT above a phrase search correctly (Tom Lane) §
Queries such as !(foo<->bar) failed to find matching rows when implemented as a GiST or GIN index search.
“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 full text search for cases where a phrase search includes an item with both prefix matching and a weight restriction (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 ts_headline() to make better headline selections when working with phrase queries (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 bugs in gin_fuzzy_search_limit processing (Adé Heyward, Tom Lane) §
A small value of gin_fuzzy_search_limit could result in unexpected slowness due to unintentionally rescanning the same index page many times. Another code path failed to apply the intended filtering at all, possibly returning too many values.
“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 input of type circle to accept the format “(” as the documentation says it does (David Zhang) §x,y),r
“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 the get_bit() and set_bit() functions cope with bytea strings longer than 256MB (Movead Li) §
Since the bit number argument is only int4, it's impossible to use these functions to access bits beyond the first 256MB of a long bytea. We'll widen the argument to int8 in v13, but in the meantime, allow these functions to work on the initial substring of a long bytea.
“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 file-not-found errors in pg_ls_waldir() and allied functions (Tom Lane) §
This prevents a race condition failure if a file is removed between when we see its directory entry and when we attempt to stat() 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
Avoid possibly leaking an open-file descriptor for a directory in pg_ls_dir(), pg_timezone_names(), pg_tablespace_databases(), and allied functions (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 polymorphic-function type resolution to correctly infer the actual type of an anyarray output when given only an anyrange input (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 server's connection-startup logic for case where a GSSAPI connection is rejected because support is not compiled in, and the client then tries SSL instead (Andrew Gierth) §
This led to a bogus “unsupported frontend protocol” failure.
Changes
Fix memory leakage during GSSAPI encryption (Tom Lane) §
Both the backend and libpq would leak memory equivalent to the total amount of data sent during the session, if GSSAPI encryption is in use.
Changes
Fix query-lifespan memory leak for a set-returning function used in a query's FROM clause (Andres Freund) §
Changes
Avoid leakage of a hashed subplan's hash tables across multiple executions (Andreas Karlsson, Tom Lane) §
This mistake could result in severe memory bloat if a query re-executed a hashed subplan enough times.
“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 planner's handling of no-op domain coercions (Tom Lane) §
Fix some cases where a domain coercion that does nothing was not completely removed from expressions.
Changes
Avoid unlikely crash when REINDEX is terminated by a session-shutdown signal (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 printout of possibly-incorrect hash join table statistics in EXPLAIN (Konstantin Knizhnik, Tom Lane, 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 reporting of elapsed time for heap truncation steps in VACUUM VERBOSE (Tatsuhito Kasahara) §
“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 undercounting of deleted B-tree index pages in VACUUM VERBOSE output (Peter Geoghegan) §
“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 wrong bookkeeping for oldest deleted page in a B-tree index (Peter Geoghegan) § §
This could cause subtly wrong decisions about when VACUUM can skip an index cleanup scan; although it appears there may be no significant user-visible effects from 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
Ensure that TimelineHistoryRead and TimelineHistoryWrite wait states are reported in all code paths that read or write timeline history files (Masahiro Ikeda) §
“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 possibly showing “waiting” twice in a process's PS status (Masahiko Sawada) §
“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 race condition when ANALYZE replaces the catalog tuple for extended statistics data (Dean Rasheed) §
Changes
Remove ill-considered skip of “redundant” anti-wraparound vacuums (Michael Paquier) §
This avoids a corner case where autovacuum could get into a loop of repeatedly trying and then skipping the same vacuum job.
Changes
Ensure INCLUDE'd columns are always removed from B-tree pivot tuples (Peter Geoghegan) §
This mistake wasted space in some rare cases, but was otherwise harmless.
Changes
Cope with invalid TOAST indexes that could be left over after a failed REINDEX CONCURRENTLY (Julien Rouhaud) §
Changes
Ensure that valid index dependencies are left behind after a failed REINDEX CONCURRENTLY (Michael Paquier) §
Previously the old index could be left with no pg_depend links at all, so that for example it would not get dropped if the parent table is dropped.
Changes
Avoid failure if autovacuum tries to access a just-dropped temporary schema (Tom Lane) §
This hazard only arises if a superuser manually drops a temporary schema; which isn't normal practice, but should work.
“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 recycling of WAL segments during crash recovery (Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais) § §
WAL segments that become ready to be archived during crash recovery were potentially recycled without being archived.
“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 scanning irrelevant timelines during archive recovery (Kyotaro Horiguchi) §
This can eliminate many attempts to fetch non-existent WAL files from archive storage, which is helpful if archive access is slow.
“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 bogus “subtransaction logged without previous top-level txn record” error check in logical decoding (Arseny Sher, Amit Kapila) §
This condition is legitimately reachable in various scenarios, so remove 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
Avoid possible failure after a replication slot copy, due to premature removal of WAL data (Masahiko Sawada, Arseny Sher) §
Changes
Ensure that a replication slot's io_in_progress_lock is released in failure code paths (Pavan Deolasee) § §
This could result in a walsender later becoming stuck waiting for the lock.
“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 generated columns are correctly handled during updates issued by logical replication (Peter Eisentraut) §
Changes
Fix race conditions in synchronous standby management (Tom Lane) §
During a change in the synchronous_standby_names setting, there was a window in which wrong decisions could be made about whether it is OK to release transactions that are waiting for synchronous commit. Another hazard for similarly wrong decisions existed if a walsender process exited and was immediately replaced by another.
“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 SQLSTATE values to a few error reports (Sawada Masahiko) §
“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/pgSQL to reliably refuse to execute an event trigger function as a plain function (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 memory leak in libpq when using sslmode=verify-full (Roman Peshkurov) §
Certificate verification during connection startup could leak some memory. This would become an issue if a client process opened many database connections during its lifetime.
“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 to treat an argument of just “-” as meaning “read from stdin” on all 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
Fix crash in psql when attempting to re-establish a failed connection (Michael Paquier) §
Changes
Allow tab-completion of the filename argument to psql's \gx command (Vik Fearing) §
“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 pg_dump support for ALTER ... DEPENDS ON EXTENSION (Álvaro Herrera) § § §
pg_dump previously ignored dependencies added this way, causing them to be forgotten during dump/restore or pg_upgrade.
“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 dump comments on RLS policy 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
In pg_dump, postpone restore of event triggers till the end (Fabrízio de Royes Mello, Hamid Akhtar, Tom Lane) § §
This minimizes the risk that an event trigger could interfere with the restoration of other objects.
“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_basebackup generates valid tar files (Robert Haas) §
In some cases a partial block of zeroes would be added to the end of the file. While this seems to be harmless with common versions of tar, it's not OK per the POSIX file format spec.
Changes
Make pg_checksums skip tablespace subdirectories that belong to a different PostgreSQL major version (Michael Banck, Bernd Helmle) §
Such subdirectories don't really belong to our database cluster, and so must not be processed.
“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 temporary copies of pg_internal.init in pg_checksums and related programs (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 quoting of --encoding, --lc-ctype and --lc-collate values in createdb utility (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
contrib/lo's lo_manage() function crashed if called directly rather than as a trigger (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 contrib/ltree, protect against overflow of ltree and lquery length fields (Nikita Glukhov) §
“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
Work around failure in contrib/pageinspect's bt_metap() function when an oldest_xact value exceeds 2^31-1 (Peter Geoghegan) §
Such XIDs will now be reported as negative integers, which isn't great but it beats throwing an error. v13 will widen the output argument to int8 to provide saner reporting.
“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 cache reference leak in contrib/sepgsql (Michael Luo) §
“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, avoid premature creation of postmaster's log file during pg_ctl start (Alexander Lakhin) §
The previous coding could allow the file to be created with permissions that wouldn't allow the postmaster to write on it.
Changes
Avoid failures when dealing with Unix-style locale names on Windows (Juan José Santamaría Flecha) §
“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, set console VT100 compatibility mode in programs that support PG_COLOR colorization (Juan José Santamaría Flecha) §
Without this, the colorization option doesn't actually work.
Changes
Stop requiring extra parentheses in ereport() calls (Andres Freund, Tom Lane) §
Changes
Use pkg-config, if available, to locate libxml2 during configure (Hugh McMaster, Tom Lane, Peter Eisentraut) §
If pkg-config is not present or lacks knowledge of libxml2, we still query xml2-config as before.
This change could break build processes that try to make PostgreSQL use a non-default version of libxml2 by putting that version's xml2-config into the PATH. Instead, set XML2_CONFIG to point to the non-default xml2-config. That method will work with either older or newer PostgreSQL releases.
“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 Makefile dependencies for libpq and ecpg (Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker) §
Changes
In MSVC builds, cope with spaces in the path name for Python (Victor Wagner) §
“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 MSVC builds, fix detection of Visual Studio version to work with more language settings (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
In MSVC builds, use -Wno-deprecated with bison versions newer than 3.0, as non-Windows builds already do (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
Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2020a for DST law changes in Morocco and the Canadian Yukon, plus historical corrections for Shanghai. (Tom Lane) § § §
The America/Godthab zone has been renamed to America/Nuuk to reflect current English usage; however, the old name remains available as a compatibility link.
Also, update initdb's list of known Windows time zone names to include recent additions, improving the odds that it will correctly translate the system time zone setting on that platform.
“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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