E.9. Postgres Pro Standard 12.16.1

Release Date: 2023-08-16

E.9.1. Overview

This release is based on PostgreSQL 12.16 and Postgres Pro Standard 12.15.1. All improvements inherited from PostgreSQL 12.16 are listed in PostgreSQL 12.16 Release Notes. Other major changes and enhancements are as follows:

  • Added the enable_appendorpath configuration parameter, which enables the Append plan for OR clauses. It is useful for applications with auto-generated queries.

  • Added support for Debian 12 and ended support for Debian 9.

  • Fixed an outdated recommendation to customize a unit file in the postgrespro-std-12.service file comments.

  • Fixed the optimizer estimation of the number of tuples with the same hash key. The optimizer did not take into account that in a join by a large number of columns, the number of unique hash keys must rapidly grow, considered the number of hash keys to be small and finally chose merge join instead of hash join.

  • Fixed usage of the joinsel component, which is needed for a more accurate cardinality estimation by several columns. If for some reason (for example, because of insufficient detailed statistics) joinsel cannot make a good prediction, Postgres Pro will not use joinsel in this particular case, but estimate cardinality using a regular algorithm. If joinsel has to estimate cardinality by a single column, a regular algorithm will also be used instead.

  • Fixed a bug that did not allow storing data of the mchar, mvarchar types larger than 250 MB. Now up to 1 GB of data of these types can be stored correctly.

  • Upgraded pg_probackup to version 2.6.5, which provides optimizations and bug fixes.

    • An attempt of a partial restore to a non-empty PGDATA directory now completes with an error, but a possibility of such a restore is retained with the --destroy-all-other-dbs flag specified.

    • Fixed inclusion of allocated but empty pages in an incremental backup.

    • Fixed point-in-time recovery issues:

      • Restore on the recovery time specified by the pg_probackup show command

      • Restore from backups with the --recovery-target-timeline and --no-validate options

    • Renamed the --skip-if-exist flag to --skip-if-exists

  • Upgraded pgpro_pwr to version 4.2, which adds interactive features to the report.

  • Upgraded PTRACK to version 2.5 Enterprise.

E.9.2. Migration to Version 12.16.1

If you are upgrading from Postgres Pro Standard based on the same PostgreSQL major version, it is enough to install the new version into your current installation directory.

While functions numeric_eq, numeric_ne, numeric_gt, numeric_ge, numeric_lt, and numeric_le are actually leakproof, they were not marked as such in Postgres Pro Standard 12.1.1, which could lead to incorrect query optimization. In particular, it negatively affected query execution if row-level security policy was in use. Version 12.2.1 repairs this issue for new installations by correcting the initial catalog data, but existing installations will still have incorrect markings unless you update pg_proc entries for these functions. You can run pg_upgrade to upgrade your server instance to a version containing the corrected initial data, or manually correct these entries in each database of the installation using the ALTER FUNCTION command. For example:

ALTER FUNCTION pg_catalog.numeric_eq LEAKPROOF

When upgrading from Postgres Pro versions 12.6.1 or lower, rebuild indexes containing at least one included column of type for which the collation was defined in the table.

If you are upgrading from Postgres Pro versions 12.6.2 or lower and take PTRACK backups using pg_probackup, retake a full backup after upgrade.