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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
2024-05-09
16.3 SupportedSupport ends 2028-11-09
| CVE / issue | Severity | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2024-4317 Restrict visibility of pg_stats_ext and pg_stats_ext_exprs entries to the table owner | 3.1 | 16.3 |
A dump/restore is not required for those running 16.X.
However, a security vulnerability was found in the system views pg_stats_ext and pg_stats_ext_exprs, potentially allowing authenticated database users to see data they shouldn't. If this is of concern in your installation, follow the steps in the first changelog entry below to rectify it.
Also, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 16.2, see Section E.14.
Changes
Restrict visibility of pg_stats_ext and pg_stats_ext_exprs entries to the table owner (Nathan Bossart) §
These views failed to hide statistics for expressions that involve columns the accessing user does not have permission to read. View columns such as most_common_vals might expose security-relevant data. The potential interactions here are not fully clear, so in the interest of erring on the side of safety, make rows in these views visible only to the owner of the associated table.
The PostgreSQL Project thanks Lukas Fittl for reporting this problem. (CVE-2024-4317)
By itself, this fix will only fix the behavior in newly initdb'd database clusters. If you wish to apply this change in an existing cluster, you will need to do the following:
Find the SQL script fix-CVE-2024-4317.sql in the share directory of the PostgreSQL installation (typically located someplace like /usr/share/postgresql/). Be sure to use the script appropriate to your PostgreSQL major version. If you do not see this file, either your version is not vulnerable (only v14–v16 are affected) or your minor version is too old to have the fix.
In each database of the cluster, run the fix-CVE-2024-4317.sql script as superuser. In psql this would look like
\i /usr/share/postgresql/fix-CVE-2024-4317.sql
(adjust the file path as appropriate). Any error probably indicates that you've used the wrong script version. It will not hurt to run the script more than once.
Do not forget to include the template0 and template1 databases, or the vulnerability will still exist in databases you create later. To fix template0, you'll need to temporarily make it accept connections. Do that with
ALTER DATABASE template0 WITH ALLOW_CONNECTIONS true;
and then after fixing template0, undo it with
ALTER DATABASE template0 WITH ALLOW_CONNECTIONS false;
“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 INSERT from multiple VALUES rows into a target column that is a domain over an array or composite type (Tom Lane) §
Such cases would either fail with surprising complaints about mismatched datatypes, or insert unexpected coercions that could lead to odd 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
Require SELECT privilege on the target table for MERGE with a DO NOTHING clause (Álvaro Herrera) §
SELECT privilege would be required in all practical cases anyway, but require it even if the query reads no columns of the target table. This avoids an edge case in which MERGE would require no privileges whatever, which seems undesirable even when it's a do-nothing 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
Fix handling of self-modified tuples in MERGE (Dean Rasheed) §
Throw an error if a target row joins to more than one source row, as required by the SQL standard. (The previous coding could silently ignore this condition if a concurrent update was involved.) Also, throw a non-misleading error if a target row is already updated by a later command in the current transaction, thanks to a BEFORE trigger or a volatile function used in the query.
“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 pruning of NULL partition when a table is partitioned on a boolean column and the query has a boolean IS NOT clause (David Rowley) §
A NULL value satisfies a clause such as boolcol IS NOT FALSE
“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 ALTER FOREIGN TABLE SET SCHEMA move any owned sequences into the new schema (Tom Lane) §
Moving a regular table to a new schema causes any sequences owned by the table to be moved to that schema too (along with indexes and constraints). This was overlooked for foreign tables, however.
“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 ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN create identity/serial sequences with the same persistence as their owning tables (Peter Eisentraut) §
CREATE UNLOGGED TABLE will make any owned sequences be unlogged too. ALTER TABLE missed that consideration, so that an added identity column would have a logged sequence, which seems pointless.
“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 ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN TYPE's error message when there is a dependent function or publication (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 CREATE DATABASE, recognize strategy keywords case-insensitively for consistency with other options (Tomas Vondra) §
“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 EXPLAIN's counting of heap pages accessed by a bitmap heap scan (Melanie Plageman) §
Previously, heap pages that contain no visible tuples were not counted; but it seems more consistent to count all pages returned by the bitmap index scan.
“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 EXPLAIN's output for subplans in MERGE (Dean Rasheed) §
EXPLAIN would sometimes fail to properly display subplan Params referencing variables in other parts of the plan tree.
“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 deadlock during removal of orphaned temporary tables (Mikhail Zhilin) §
If the session that creates a temporary table crashes without removing the table, autovacuum will eventually try to remove the orphaned table. However, an incoming session that's been assigned the same temporary namespace will do that too. If a temporary table has a dependency (such as an owned sequence) then a deadlock could result between these two cleanup attempts.
“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 updating of visibility map state in VACUUM with the DISABLE_PAGE_SKIPPING option (Heikki Linnakangas) §
Due to an oversight, this mode caused all heap pages to be dirtied, resulting in excess I/O. Also, visibility map bits that were incorrectly set would not get cleared.
Changes
Avoid race condition while examining per-relation frozen-XID values (Noah Misch) §
VACUUM's computation of per-database frozen-XID values from per-relation values could get confused by a concurrent update of those values by another VACUUM.
“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 buffer usage reporting for parallel vacuuming (Anthonin Bonnefoy) §
Buffer accesses performed by parallel workers were not getting counted in the statistics reported in VERBOSE mode.
“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 join conditions generated from equivalence classes are applied at the correct plan level (Tom Lane) §
In versions before PostgreSQL 16, it was possible for generated conditions to be evaluated below outer joins when they should be evaluated above (after) the outer join, leading to incorrect query results. All versions have a similar hazard when considering joins to UNION ALL trees that have constant outputs for the join column in some SELECT arms.
“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 “could not find pathkey item to sort” errors occurring while planning aggregate functions with ORDER BY or DISTINCT options (David Rowley) §
This is similar to a fix applied in 16.1, but it solves the problem for parallel plans.
Changes
Prevent potentially-incorrect optimization of some window functions (David Rowley) §
Disable “run condition” optimization of ntile() and count() with non-constant arguments. This avoids possible misbehavior with sub-selects, typically leading to errors like “WindowFunc not found in subplan target lists”.
“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 unnecessary use of moving-aggregate mode with a non-moving window frame (Vallimaharajan G) §
When a plain aggregate is used as a window function, and the window frame start is specified as UNBOUNDED PRECEDING, the frame's head cannot move so we do not need to use the special (and more expensive) moving-aggregate mode. This optimization was intended all along, but due to a coding error it never triggered.
“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 use of already-freed data while planning partition-wise joins under GEQO (Tom Lane) §
This would typically end in a crash or unexpected error 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
Avoid freeing still-in-use data in Memoize (Tender Wang, Andrei Lepikhov) §
In production builds this error frequently didn't cause any problems, as the freed data would most likely not get overwritten before it was used.
“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 incorrectly-reported statistics kind codes in “requested statistics kind X is not yet built” error messages (David Rowley) §
“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 a hash table instead of linear search for “catcache list” objects (Tom Lane) §
This change solves performance problems that were reported for certain operations in installations with many thousands of roles.
Changes
Be more careful with RECORD-returning functions in FROM (Tom Lane) § §
The output columns of such a function call must be defined by an AS clause that specifies the column names and data types. If the actual function output value doesn't match that, an error is supposed to be thrown at runtime. However, some code paths would examine the actual value prematurely, and potentially issue strange errors or suffer assertion failures if it doesn't match expectations.
“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 about the return rowtype of SQL-language procedures (Tom Lane) §
A procedure implemented in SQL language that returns a single composite-type column would cause an assertion failure or core dump.
“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 protective stack depth checks to some recursive functions (Egor Chindyaskin) §
“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 mis-rounding and overflow hazards in date_bin() (Moaaz Assali) §
In the case where the source timestamp is before the origin timestamp and their difference is already an exact multiple of the stride, the code incorrectly subtracted the stride anyway. Also, detect some integer-overflow cases that would have produced incorrect 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
Detect integer overflow when adding or subtracting an interval to/from a timestamp (Joseph Koshakow) §
Some cases that should cause an out-of-range error produced an incorrect result 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
Avoid race condition in pg_get_expr() (Tom Lane) §
If the relation referenced by the argument is dropped concurrently, the function's intention is to return NULL, but sometimes it failed 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 detection of old transaction IDs in XID status functions (Karina Litskevich) §
Transaction IDs more than 231 transactions in the past could be misidentified as recent, leading to misbehavior of pg_xact_status() or txid_status().
“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 table's freespace map won't return a page that's past the end of the table (Ronan Dunklau) §
Because the freespace map isn't WAL-logged, this was possible in edge cases involving an OS crash, a replica promote, or a PITR restore. The result would be a “could not read block” 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 file descriptor leakage when an error is thrown while waiting in WaitEventSetWait (Etsuro Fujita) §
“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 corrupting exception stack if an FDW implements async append but doesn't configure any wait conditions for the Append plan node to wait for (Alexander Pyhalov) §
“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
Throw an error if an index is accessed while it is being reindexed (Tom Lane) §
Previously this was just an assertion check, but promote it into a regular runtime error. This will provide a more on-point error message when reindexing a user-defined index expression that attempts to access its own 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
Ensure that index-only scans on name columns return a fully-padded value (David Rowley) §
The value physically stored in the index is truncated, and previously a pointer to that value was returned to callers. This provoked complaints when testing under valgrind. In theory it could result in crashes, though none have been reported.
“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 condition that could lead to reporting an incorrect conflict cause when invalidating a replication slot (Bertrand Drouvot) §
Changes
Fix race condition in deciding whether a table sync operation is needed in logical replication (Vignesh C) §
An invalidation event arriving while a subscriber identifies which tables need to be synced would be forgotten about, so that any tables newly in need of syncing might not get processed in a timely fashion.
“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 with DSM allocations larger than 4GB (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
Disconnect if a new server session's client socket cannot be put into non-blocking mode (Heikki Linnakangas) §
It was once theoretically possible for us to operate with a socket that's in blocking mode; but that hasn't worked fully in a long time, so fail at connection start rather than misbehave later.
“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 inadequate error reporting with OpenSSL 3.0.0 and later (Heikki Linnakangas, Tom Lane) §
System-reported errors passed through by OpenSSL were reported with a numeric error code rather than anything readable.
“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 thread-safety of error reporting for getaddrinfo() on Windows (Thomas Munro) §
A multi-threaded libpq client program could get an incorrect or corrupted error message after a network lookup failure.
Changes
Avoid concurrent calls to bindtextdomain() in libpq and ecpglib (Tom Lane) § §
Although GNU gettext's implementation seems to be fine with concurrent calls, the version available on Windows is not.
“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 ecpg's preprocessor if the program tries to redefine a macro that was defined on the preprocessor command line (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 ecpg, avoid issuing false “unsupported feature will be passed to server” warnings (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 the string result of ecpg's intoasc() function is correctly zero-terminated (Oleg Tselebrovskiy) §
“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 initdb's -c option, match parameter names case-insensitively (Tom Lane) §
The server treats parameter names case-insensitively, so this code should too. This avoids putting redundant entries into the generated postgresql.conf file.
Changes
In psql, avoid leaking a query result after the query is cancelled (Tom Lane) §
This happened only when cancelling a non-last query in a query string made with \; separators.
“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_dumpall so that role comments, if present, will be dumped regardless of the setting of --no-role-passwords (Daniel Gustafsson, 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
Skip files named .DS_Store in pg_basebackup, pg_checksums, and pg_rewind (Daniel Gustafsson) §
This avoids problems on macOS, where the Finder may create such 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 PL/pgSQL's parsing of single-line comments (---style comments) following expressions (Erik Wienhold, Tom Lane) §
This mistake caused parse errors if such a comment followed a WHEN expression in a PL/pgSQL CASE statement.
“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, don't report false match failures due to short- versus long-header values (Andrey Borodin, Michael Zhilin) § §
A variable-length datum in a heap tuple or index tuple could have either a short or a long header, depending on compression parameters that applied when it was made. Treat these cases as equivalent rather than complaining if there's a difference.
“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 BRIN output functions (Tomas Vondra) § §
These output functions are only used for displaying index entries in contrib/pageinspect, so the errors are of limited practical concern.
“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/postgres_fdw, avoid emitting requests to sort by a constant (David Rowley) §
This could occur in cases involving UNION ALL with constant-emitting subqueries. Sorting by a constant is useless of course, but it also risks being misinterpreted by the remote server, leading to “ORDER BY position N is not in select list” 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
Make contrib/postgres_fdw set the remote session's time zone to GMT not UTC (Tom Lane) §
This should have the same results for practical purposes. However, GMT is recognized by hard-wired code in the server, while UTC is looked up in the timezone database. So the old code could fail in the unlikely event that the remote server's timezone database is missing entries.
“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/xml2, avoid use of library functions that have been deprecated in recent versions of libxml2 (Dmitry Koval) §
“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 incompatibility with LLVM 18 (Thomas Munro, Dmitry Dolgov) §
“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 make check to work with the musl C library (Thomas Munro, Bruce Momjian, 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.
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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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