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
2018-02-08
9.5.11 HistoricalSupport ends 2021-02-11
| CVE / issue | Severity | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2018-1053 Ensure that all temporary files made by pg_upgrade are non-world-readable | 6.7 | 9.5.11 |
A dump/restore is not required for those running 9.5.X.
However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 9.5.10, see Section E.16.
Changes
Ensure that all temporary files made by pg_upgrade are non-world-readable (Tom Lane, Noah Misch)
pg_upgrade normally restricts its temporary files to be readable and writable only by the calling user. But the temporary file containing pg_dumpall -g output would be group- or world-readable, or even writable, if the user's umask setting allows. In typical usage on multi-user machines, the umask and/or the working directory's permissions would be tight enough to prevent problems; but there may be people using pg_upgrade in scenarios where this oversight would permit disclosure of database passwords to unfriendly eyes. (CVE-2018-1053)
“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 vacuuming of tuples that were updated while key-share locked (Andres Freund, Álvaro Herrera)
In some cases VACUUM would fail to remove such tuples even though they are now dead, leading to assorted data corruption scenarios.
“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 buffer locking in some LSN fetches (Jacob Champion, Asim Praveen, Ashwin Agrawal)
These errors could result in misbehavior under concurrent load. The potential consequences have not been characterized fully.
“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 from cases involving flattening of subqueries whose outputs are used in GROUPING SETS (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
Avoid unnecessary failure in a query on an inheritance tree that occurs concurrently with some child table being removed from the tree by ALTER TABLE NO INHERIT (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 spurious deadlock failures when multiple sessions are running CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY (Jeff Janes)
“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 failures when an inheritance tree contains foreign child tables (Etsuro Fujita)
A mix of regular and foreign tables in an inheritance tree resulted in creation of incorrect plans for UPDATE and DELETE queries. This led to visible failures in some cases, notably when there are row-level triggers on a foreign child 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
Repair failure with correlated sub-SELECT inside VALUES inside a LATERAL subquery (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 "could not devise a query plan for the given query" planner failure for some cases involving nested UNION ALL inside a lateral subquery (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 logical decoding to correctly clean up disk files for crashed transactions (Atsushi Torikoshi)
Logical decoding may spill WAL records to disk for transactions generating many WAL records. Normally these files are cleaned up after the transaction's commit or abort record arrives; but if no such record is ever seen, the removal code misbehaved.
“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 walsender timeout failure and failure to respond to interrupts when processing a large transaction (Petr Jelinek)
“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 has_sequence_privilege() to support WITH GRANT OPTION tests, as other privilege-testing functions do (Joe Conway)
“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 databases using UTF8 encoding, ignore any XML declaration that asserts a different encoding (Pavel Stehule, Noah Misch)
We always store XML strings in the database encoding, so allowing libxml to act on a declaration of another encoding gave wrong results. In encodings other than UTF8, we don't promise to support non-ASCII XML data anyway, so retain the previous behavior for bug compatibility. This change affects only xpath() and related functions; other XML code paths already acted this 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
Provide for forward compatibility with future minor protocol versions (Robert Haas, Badrul Chowdhury)
Up to now, PostgreSQL servers simply rejected requests to use protocol versions newer than 3.0, so that there was no functional difference between the major and minor parts of the protocol version number. Allow clients to request versions 3.x without failing, sending back a message showing that the server only understands 3.0. This makes no difference at the moment, but back-patching this change should allow speedier introduction of future minor protocol upgrades.
“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
Cope with failure to start a parallel worker process (Amit Kapila, Robert Haas)
Parallel query previously tended to hang indefinitely if a worker could not be started, as the result of fork() failure or other low-probability problems.
“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 unsafe alignment assumptions when working with __int128 (Tom Lane)
Typically, compilers assume that __int128 variables are aligned on 16-byte boundaries, but our memory allocation infrastructure isn't prepared to guarantee that, and increasing the setting of MAXALIGN seems infeasible for multiple reasons. Adjust the code to allow use of __int128 only when we can tell the compiler to assume lesser alignment. The only known symptom of this problem so far is crashes in some parallel aggregation queries.
“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 when planning extremely deeply nested set operations (UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT) (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 null-pointer crashes for some types of LDAP URLs appearing in pg_hba.conf (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 sample INSTR() functions in the PL/pgSQL documentation (Yugo Nagata, Tom Lane)
These functions are stated to be Oracle® compatible, but they weren't exactly. In particular, there was a discrepancy in the interpretation of a negative third parameter: Oracle thinks that a negative value indicates the last place where the target substring can begin, whereas our functions took it as the last place where the target can end. Also, Oracle throws an error for a zero or negative fourth parameter, whereas our functions returned zero.
The sample code has been adjusted to match Oracle's behavior more precisely. Users who have copied this code into their applications may wish to update their copies.
“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 make ACL (permissions), comment, and security label entries reliably identifiable in archive output formats (Tom Lane)
The "tag" portion of an ACL archive entry was usually just the name of the associated object. Make it start with the object type instead, bringing ACLs into line with the convention already used for comment and security label archive entries. Also, fix the comment and security label entries for the whole database, if present, to make their tags start with DATABASE so that they also follow this convention. This prevents false matches in code that tries to identify large-object-related entries by seeing if the tag starts with LARGE OBJECT. That could have resulted in misclassifying entries as data rather than schema, with undesirable results in a schema-only or data-only dump.
Note that this change has user-visible results in the output of pg_restore --list.
“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
Rename pg_rewind's copy_file_range function to avoid conflict with new Linux system call of that name (Andres Freund)
This change prevents build failures with newer glibc versions.
“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, detect indicator arrays that do not have the correct length and report an error (David Rader)
“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 triggering a libc assertion in contrib/hstore, due to use of memcpy() with equal source and destination pointers (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
Provide modern examples of how to auto-start Postgres on macOS (Tom Lane)
The scripts in contrib/start-scripts/osx use infrastructure that's been deprecated for over a decade, and which no longer works at all in macOS releases of the last couple of years. Add a new subdirectory contrib/start-scripts/macos containing scripts that use the newer launchd infrastructure.
“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 selection of configuration-specific libraries for OpenSSL on Windows (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
Support linking to MinGW-built versions of libperl (Noah Misch)
This allows building PL/Perl with some common Perl distributions for 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 MSVC build to test whether 32-bit libperl needs -D_USE_32BIT_TIME_T (Noah Misch)
Available Perl distributions are inconsistent about what they expect, and lack any reliable means of reporting it, so resort to a build-time test on what the library being used actually does.
“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, install the crash dump handler earlier in postmaster startup (Takayuki Tsunakawa)
This may allow collection of a core dump for some early-startup failures that did not produce a dump before.
“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 encoding-conversion-related crashes when emitting messages very early in postmaster startup (Takayuki Tsunakawa)
“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 our existing Motorola 68K spinlock code on OpenBSD as well as NetBSD (David Carlier)
“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 support for spinlocks on Motorola 88K (David Carlier)
“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 2018c for DST law changes in Brazil, Sao Tome and Principe, plus historical corrections for Bolivia, Japan, and South Sudan. The US/Pacific-New zone has been removed (it was only an alias for America/Los_Angeles 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.
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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.