E.144. Release 9.0.2
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## E.144. Release 9.0.2

Release date: 2010-12-16

This release contains a variety of fixes from 9.0.1. For information about new features in the 9.0 major release, see Section E.146.

### E.144.1. Migration to Version 9.0.2

A dump/restore is not required for those running 9.0.X.

### E.144.2. Changes

- Force the default `wal_sync_method` to be `fdatasync` on Linux (Tom Lane, Marti Raudsepp)

  The default on Linux has actually been `fdatasync` for many years, but recent kernel changes caused PostgreSQL to choose `open_datasync` instead. This choice did not result in any performance improvement, and caused outright failures on certain filesystems, notably `ext4` with the `data=journal` mount option.

- Fix “too many KnownAssignedXids” error during Hot Standby replay (Heikki Linnakangas)

- Fix race condition in lock acquisition during Hot Standby (Simon Riggs)

- Avoid unnecessary conflicts during Hot Standby (Simon Riggs)

  This fixes some cases where replay was considered to conflict with standby queries (causing delay of replay or possibly cancellation of the queries), but there was no real conflict.

- Fix assorted bugs in WAL replay logic for GIN indexes (Tom Lane)

  This could result in “bad buffer id: 0” failures or corruption of index contents during replication.

- Fix recovery from base backup when the starting checkpoint WAL record is not in the same WAL segment as its redo point (Jeff Davis)

- Fix corner-case bug when streaming replication is enabled immediately after creating the master database cluster (Heikki Linnakangas)

- Fix persistent slowdown of autovacuum workers when multiple workers remain active for a long time (Tom Lane)

  The effective `vacuum_cost_limit` for an autovacuum worker could drop to nearly zero if it processed enough tables, causing it to run extremely slowly.

- Fix long-term memory leak in autovacuum launcher (Alvaro Herrera)

- Avoid failure when trying to report an impending transaction wraparound condition from outside a transaction (Tom Lane)

  This oversight prevented recovery after transaction wraparound got too close, because database startup processing would fail.

- Add support for detecting register-stack overrun on `IA64` (Tom Lane)

  The `IA64` architecture has two hardware stacks. Full prevention of stack-overrun failures requires checking both.

- Add a check for stack overflow in `copyObject()` (Tom Lane)

  Certain code paths could crash due to stack overflow given a sufficiently complex query.

- Fix detection of page splits in temporary GiST indexes (Heikki Linnakangas)

  It is possible to have a “concurrent” page split in a temporary index, if for example there is an open cursor scanning the index when an insertion is done. GiST failed to detect this case and hence could deliver wrong results when execution of the cursor continued.

- Fix error checking during early connection processing (Tom Lane)

  The check for too many child processes was skipped in some cases, possibly leading to postmaster crash when attempting to add the new child process to fixed-size arrays.

- Improve efficiency of window functions (Tom Lane)

  Certain cases where a large number of tuples needed to be read in advance, but `work_mem` was large enough to allow them all to be held in memory, were unexpectedly slow. `percent_rank()`, `cume_dist()` and `ntile()` in particular were subject to this problem.

- Avoid memory leakage while `ANALYZE`'ing complex index expressions (Tom Lane)

- Ensure an index that uses a whole-row Var still depends on its table (Tom Lane)

  An index declared like `create index i on t (foo(t.*))` would not automatically get dropped when its table was dropped.

- Add missing support in `DROP OWNED BY` for removing foreign data wrapper/server privileges belonging to a user (Heikki Linnakangas)

- Do not “inline” a SQL function with multiple `OUT` parameters (Tom Lane)

  This avoids a possible crash due to loss of information about the expected result rowtype.

- Fix crash when inline-ing a set-returning function whose argument list contains a reference to an inline-able user function (Tom Lane)

- Behave correctly if `ORDER BY`, `LIMIT`, `FOR UPDATE`, or `WITH` is attached to the `VALUES` part of `INSERT ... VALUES` (Tom Lane)

- Make the `OFF` keyword unreserved (Heikki Linnakangas)

  This prevents problems with using `off` as a variable name in PL/pgSQL. That worked before 9.0, but was now broken because PL/pgSQL now treats all core reserved words as reserved.

- Fix constant-folding of `COALESCE()` expressions (Tom Lane)

  The planner would sometimes attempt to evaluate sub-expressions that in fact could never be reached, possibly leading to unexpected errors.

- Fix “could not find pathkey item to sort” planner failure with comparison of whole-row Vars (Tom Lane)

- Fix postmaster crash when connection acceptance (`accept()` or one of the calls made immediately after it) fails, and the postmaster was compiled with GSSAPI support (Alexander Chernikov)

- Retry after receiving an invalid response packet from a RADIUS authentication server (Magnus Hagander)

  This fixes a low-risk potential denial of service condition.

- Fix missed unlink of temporary files when `log_temp_files` is active (Tom Lane)

  If an error occurred while attempting to emit the log message, the unlink was not done, resulting in accumulation of temp files.

- Add print functionality for `InhRelation` nodes (Tom Lane)

  This avoids a failure when `debug_print_parse` is enabled and certain types of query are executed.

- Fix incorrect calculation of distance from a point to a horizontal line segment (Tom Lane)

  This bug affected several different geometric distance-measurement operators.

- Fix incorrect calculation of transaction status in ecpg (Itagaki Takahiro)

- Fix errors in psql's Unicode-escape support (Tom Lane)

- Speed up parallel pg_restore when the archive contains many large objects (blobs) (Tom Lane)

- Fix PL/pgSQL's handling of “simple” expressions to not fail in recursion or error-recovery cases (Tom Lane)

- Fix PL/pgSQL's error reporting for no-such-column cases (Tom Lane)

  As of 9.0, it would sometimes report “missing FROM-clause entry for table foo” when “record foo has no field bar” would be more appropriate.

- Fix PL/Python to honor typmod (i.e., length or precision restrictions) when assigning to tuple fields (Tom Lane)

  This fixes a regression from 8.4.

- Fix PL/Python's handling of set-returning functions (Jan Urbanski)

  Attempts to call SPI functions within the iterator generating a set result would fail.

- Fix bug in `contrib/cube`'s GiST picksplit algorithm (Alexander Korotkov)

  This could result in considerable inefficiency, though not actually incorrect answers, in a GiST index on a `cube` column. If you have such an index, consider `REINDEX`ing it after installing this update.

- Don't emit “identifier will be truncated” notices in `contrib/dblink` except when creating new connections (Itagaki Takahiro)

- Fix potential coredump on missing public key in `contrib/pgcrypto` (Marti Raudsepp)

- Fix buffer overrun in `contrib/pg_upgrade` (Hernan Gonzalez)

- Fix memory leak in `contrib/xml2`'s XPath query functions (Tom Lane)

- Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2010o for DST law changes in Fiji and Samoa; also historical corrections for Hong Kong.

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