E.50.1. Migration to Version 8.4.19

A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.4.X.

However, this release corrects a potential data corruption issue. See the first changelog entry below to find out whether your installation has been affected and what steps you can take if so.

Also, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.4.17, see Section E.52.

E.50.2. Changes

• Fix VACUUM's tests to see whether it can update relfrozenxid (Andres Freund)

  In some cases VACUUM (either manual or autovacuum) could incorrectly advance a table's relfrozenxid value, allowing tuples to escape freezing, causing those rows to become invisible once 2^31 transactions have elapsed. The probability of data loss is fairly low since multiple incorrect advancements would need to happen before actual loss occurs, but it's not zero. Users upgrading from release 8.4.8 or earlier are not affected, but all later versions contain the bug.

  The issue can be ameliorated by, after upgrading, vacuuming all tables in all databases while having vacuum_freeze_table_age set to zero. This will fix any latent corruption but will not be able to fix all pre-existing data errors. However, an installation can be presumed safe after performing this vacuuming if it has executed fewer than 2^31 update transactions in its lifetime (check this with SELECT txid_current() < 2^31).

• Fix race condition in GIN index posting tree page deletion (Heikki Linnakangas)

  This could lead to transient wrong answers or query failures.

• Avoid flattening a subquery whose SELECT list contains a volatile function wrapped inside a sub-SELECT (Tom Lane)

  This avoids unexpected results due to extra evaluations of the volatile function.

• Fix planner's processing of non-simple-variable subquery outputs nested within outer joins (Tom Lane)

  This error could lead to incorrect plans for queries involving multiple levels of subqueries within JOIN syntax.

• Fix premature deletion of temporary files (Andres Freund)

• Fix possible read past end of memory in rule printing (Peter Eisentraut)

• Fix array slicing of int2vector and oidvector values (Tom Lane)

  Expressions of this kind are now implicitly promoted to regular int2 or oid arrays.

• Fix incorrect behaviors when using a SQL-standard, simple GMT offset timezone (Tom Lane)

  In some cases, the system would use the simple GMT offset value when it should have used the regular timezone setting that had prevailed before the simple offset was selected. This change also causes the timeofday function to honor the simple GMT offset zone.

• Prevent possible misbehavior when logging translations of Windows error codes (Tom Lane)

• Properly quote generated command lines in pg_ctl (Naoya Anzai and Tom Lane)

  This fix applies only to Windows.

• Fix pg_dumpall to work when a source database sets default_transaction_read_only via ALTER DATABASE SET (Kevin Grittner)

  Previously, the generated script would fail during restore.

• Fix ecpg's processing of lists of variables declared varchar (Zoltán Böszörményi)

• Make contrib/lo defend against incorrect trigger definitions (Marc Cousin)

• Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2013h for DST law changes in Argentina, Brazil, Jordan, Libya, Liechtenstein, Morocco, and Palestine. Also, new timezone abbreviations WIB, WIT, WITA for Indonesia.