Software Update: PostgreSQL 9.3.4 / 9.2.8 / 9.1.13/ 9.0.17 / 8.4.21

Updates have been released to PostgreSQL from the 9.3, 9.2, 9.1, 9.0, and 8.4 series. This popular ‘open source relational database management system’ runs on a large number of operating systems and can therefore be used in various environments. It is a derivative of Ingres, after its lead developer started his own business and this open source database became closed source. The release notes for this bugfix release can be found below.

PostgreSQL updates 9.3.4, 9.2.8, 9.1.13, 9.0.17, and 8.4.21 released

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported version of the database system, including versions 9.3.4, 9.2.8, 9.1.13, 9.0.17, and 8.4.21. This minor release fixes a data corruption issue with replication and crash recovery in version 9.3, as well as several other minor issues in all versions. All users of version 9.3 are urged to update their installations at the next possible downtime. Users of older versions should update at their convenience.

The data corruption issue in PostgreSQL 9.3 affects binary replication standbys, servers being recovered from point-in-time-recovery backup, and standalone servers which recover from a system crash. The bug causes unrecoverable index corruption during recovery due to incorrect replay of row locking operations. This can then cause query results to be inconsistent depending on whether or not an index is used, and eventually lead to primary key violations and similar issues. For this reason, users are encouraged to replace each of their standby databases with a new base backup after applying the update.

Other PostgreSQL 9.3-only fixes in this update include:

• Make sure that statistics files for dropped databases get deleted
• Allow materialized views to be referenced in UPDATE and DELETE queries
• Add read-only data_checksum parameter
• Prevent erroneous operator push down in postgres_fdw

This release resolves some other issues in all versions of PostgreSQL, including:

• Fix timing consistency issue with NOTIFY
• Allow regular expression execution to be cancelled
• Improve performance of index checks for newly added rows
• Prevent premature roller disconnection
• Prevent memory errors on newer Windows versions
• Update timezone files

Additional changes and details of some of the above issues can be found in the Release Notes. Two of the issues which affect version 9.3 have additional information on the 9.3.4 Update Wiki Page.