PostgreSQL 8.4.17 Documentation
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# E.36. Release 8.3.6

> Release Date: 2009-02-02

This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.3.5. For information about new features in the 8.3 major release, see Section E.42.

## E.36.1. Migration to Version 8.3.6

A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.3.X. However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.3.5, see the release notes for 8.3.5.

## E.36.2. Changes

- Make `DISCARD ALL` release advisory locks, in addition to everything it already did (Tom)

  This was decided to be the most appropriate behavior. This could affect existing applications, however.

- Fix whole-index GiST scans to work correctly (Teodor)

  This error could cause rows to be lost if a table is clustered on a GiST index.

- Fix crash of `xmlconcat(NULL)` (Peter)

- Fix possible crash in `ispell` dictionary if high-bit-set characters are used as flags (Teodor)

  This is known to be done by one widely available Norwegian dictionary, and the same condition may exist in others.

- Fix misordering of pg_dump output for composite types (Tom)

  The most likely problem was for user-defined operator classes to be dumped after indexes or views that needed them.

- Improve handling of URLs in `headline()` function (Teodor)

- Improve handling of overlength headlines in `headline()` function (Teodor)

- Prevent possible Assert failure or misconversion if an encoding conversion is created with the wrong conversion function for the specified pair of encodings (Tom, Heikki)

- Fix possible Assert failure if a statement executed in PL/pgSQL is rewritten into another kind of statement, for example if an `INSERT` is rewritten into an `UPDATE` (Heikki)

- Ensure that a snapshot is available to datatype input functions (Tom)

  This primarily affects domains that are declared with `CHECK` constraints involving user-defined stable or immutable functions. Such functions typically fail if no snapshot has been set.

- Make it safer for SPI-using functions to be used within datatype I/O; in particular, to be used in domain check constraints (Tom)

- Avoid unnecessary locking of small tables in `VACUUM` (Heikki)

- Fix a problem that sometimes kept `ALTER TABLE ENABLE/DISABLE RULE` from being recognized by active sessions (Tom)

- Fix a problem that made `UPDATE RETURNING tableoid` return zero instead of the correct OID (Tom)

- Allow functions declared as taking `ANYARRAY` to work on the `pg_statistic` columns of that type (Tom)

  This used to work, but was unintentionally broken in 8.3.

- Fix planner misestimation of selectivity when transitive equality is applied to an outer-join clause (Tom)

  This could result in bad plans for queries like `... from a left join b on a.a1 = b.b1 where a.a1 = 42 ...`

- Improve optimizer's handling of long `IN` lists (Tom)

  This change avoids wasting large amounts of time on such lists when constraint exclusion is enabled.

- Prevent synchronous scan during GIN index build (Tom)

  Because GIN is optimized for inserting tuples in increasing TID order, choosing to use a synchronous scan could slow the build by a factor of three or more.

- Ensure that the contents of a holdable cursor don't depend on the contents of TOAST tables (Tom)

  Previously, large field values in a cursor result might be represented as TOAST pointers, which would fail if the referenced table got dropped before the cursor is read, or if the large value is deleted and then vacuumed away. This cannot happen with an ordinary cursor, but it could with a cursor that is held past its creating transaction.

- Fix memory leak when a set-returning function is terminated without reading its whole result (Tom)

- Fix encoding conversion problems in XML functions when the database encoding isn't UTF-8 (Tom)

- Fix `contrib/dblink`'s `dblink_get_result(text,bool)` function (Joe)

- Fix possible garbage output from `contrib/sslinfo` functions (Tom)

- Fix incorrect behavior of `contrib/tsearch2` compatibility trigger when it's fired more than once in a command (Teodor)

- Fix possible mis-signaling in autovacuum (Heikki)

- Support running as a service on Windows 7 beta (Dave and Magnus)

- Fix ecpg's handling of varchar structs (Michael)

- Fix configure script to properly report failure when unable to obtain linkage information for PL/Perl (Andrew)

- Make all documentation reference `pgsql-bugs` and/or `pgsql-hackers` as appropriate, instead of the now-decommissioned `pgsql-ports` and `pgsql-patches` mailing lists (Tom)

- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2009a (for Kathmandu and historical DST corrections in Switzerland, Cuba)

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