PostgreSQL 15.4, 14.9, 13.12, 12.16, 11.21, and PostgreSQL 16 Beta 3 Released!

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of PostgreSQL, including 15.4, 14.9, 13.12, 12.16, and 11.21, as well as the third beta release of PostgreSQL 16. This release fixes two security vulnerabilities and over 40 bugs reported over the last several months.

If you use BRIN indexes to look up NULL values, you will need to reindex them after upgrading to this release. On PostgreSQL 12 and above, you can use REINDEX CONCURRENTLY to avoid blocking writes to the affected index and table, for example:

REINDEX INDEX CONCURRENTLY your_index_name;

For the full list of changes, please review the release notes.

PostgreSQL 11 EOL Notice

PostgreSQL 11 will stop receiving fixes on November 9, 2023. If you are running PostgreSQL 11 in a production environment, we suggest that you make plans to upgrade to a newer, supported version of PostgreSQL. Please see our versioning policy for more information.

Security Issues

CVE-2023-39417: Extension script @substitutions@ within quoting allow SQL injection.

Supported, Vulnerable Versions: 11 - 15. The security team typically does not test unsupported versions, but this problem is quite old.

An extension script is vulnerable if it uses @extowner@, @extschema@, or @extschema:...@ inside a quoting construct (dollar quoting, '', or ""). No bundled extension is vulnerable. Vulnerable uses do appear in a documentation example and in non-bundled extensions. Hence, the attack prerequisite is an administrator having installed files of a vulnerable, trusted, non-bundled extension. Subject to that prerequisite, this enables an attacker having database-level CREATE privilege to execute arbitrary code as the bootstrap superuser. PostgreSQL will block this attack in the core server, so there's no need to modify individual extensions.

The PostgreSQL project thanks Micah Gate, Valerie Woolard, Tim Carey-Smith, and Christoph Berg for reporting this problem.

CVE-2023-39418: MERGE fails to enforce UPDATE or SELECT row security policies.

Supported, Vulnerable Versions: 15.

PostgreSQL 15 introduced the MERGE command, which fails to test new rows against row security policies defined for UPDATE and SELECT. If UPDATE and SELECT policies forbid some row that INSERT policies do not forbid, a user could store such rows. Subsequent consequences are application-dependent. This affects only databases that have used CREATE POLICY to define a row security policy.

The PostgreSQL project thanks Dean Rasheed for reporting this problem.

A Note on the PostgreSQL 16 Beta

This release marks the third beta release of PostgreSQL 16 and puts the community one step closer to general availability tentatively around the end of the third quarter.

In the spirit of the open source PostgreSQL community, we strongly encourage you to test the new features of PostgreSQL 16 on your systems to help us eliminate bugs or other issues that may exist. While we do not advise you to run PostgreSQL 16 Beta 3 in production environments, we encourage you to find ways to run your typical application workloads against this beta release.

Your testing and feedback will help the community ensure that PostgreSQL 16 upholds our standards of delivering a stable, reliable release of the world's most advanced open source relational database. Please read more about our beta testing process and how you can contribute:

https://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta/

You can find information about all of the PostgreSQL 16 features and changes in the release notes:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/release-16.html

Bug Fixes and Improvements

This update fixes over 40 bugs that were reported in the last several months. The issues listed below affect PostgreSQL 15. Some of these issues may also affect other supported versions of PostgreSQL.

• Fix for handling of NULL values in BRIN indexes. This fix does not apply to existing BRIN indexes -- you will need to run REINDEX to fix any BRIN indexes used to search for NULL values.
• Avoid leaving a corrupted database behind when DROP DATABASE is interrupted.
• Several fixes for partitioned indexes.
• Fix ALTER EXTENSION ... SET SCHEMA to error if the extension contains any objects outside the extension's schema.
• Fix dependency tracking of access methods for tables.
• Don't use partial unique indexes for uniqueness proofs in the planner.
• Correctly handle sub-SELECTs in RLS policy expressions and security-barrier views when expanding rule actions.
• Fix race conditions in conflict detection for SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation mode.
• Fix intermittent failures when trying to update a field of a composite column that requires out-of-line TOASTing.
• Fix several memory leaks that occurred during the lifespan of a query.
• Accept fractional seconds in the input to the jsonpath datetime() method.
• Increase token limit in pg_hba.conf and pg_ident.conf to 10,240 bytes.
• An out-of-memory error from JIT will now cause a PostgreSQL FATAL error instead of a C++ exception.
• Allow VACUUM to continue after detecting certain types of B-tree index corruption. While this fix allows VACUUM to continue, you still need to REINDEX to fix the broken index.
• Avoid double replay of prepared transactions during crash recovery.
• Ensure that checkpoint calls fsync on a newly created but empty table.
• Silence "missing contrecord" errors to avoid logging inaccurate messages from pg_waldump and walsender.
• Fix the [fuzzystrmatch](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/fuzzystrmatch.html Soundex difference() function to correctly handle empty input.
• Several fixes for intarray, including disallowing oversize input arrays in a GiST index.
• Fix pg_dump to correctly handle SQL-standard function bodies (BEGIN ATOMIC) that require parse-time dependencies on unique indexes.

For the full list of changes available, please review the release notes.

Fixes in PostgreSQL 16 Beta 3

• Add the \drg command to psql to display information about role grants.
• Add timeline ID to filenames generated with pg_waldump --save-fullpage.
• Fix crash after a deadlock occurs in a parallel VACUUM worker.

Please see the release notes for a complete list of new and changed features:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/release-16.html

Updating

All PostgreSQL update releases are cumulative. As with other minor releases, users are not required to dump and reload their database or use pg_upgrade in order to apply this update release; you may simply shutdown PostgreSQL and update its binaries.

If you use BRIN indexes to look up NULL values, you will need to reindex them after upgrading to this release. On PostgreSQL 12 and above, you can use REINDEX CONCURRENTLY to avoid blocking writes to the affected index and table, for example:

REINDEX INDEX CONCURRENTLY your_index_name;

Users who have skipped one or more update releases may need to run additional post-update steps; please see the release notes from earlier versions for details.

For more details, please see the release notes.

Updating to PostgreSQL 16 Beta 3

To upgrade to PostgreSQL 16 Beta 3 from a previous PostgreSQL 16 Beta version, or a previous major version of PostgreSQL, you will need to use a strategy similar to upgrading between major versions of PostgreSQL (e.g. pg_upgrade or pg_dump / pg_restore). For more information, please visit the documentation section on upgrading.

Testing for Bugs & Compatibility

The stability of each PostgreSQL release greatly depends on you, the community, to test the upcoming version with your workloads and testing tools in order to find bugs and regressions before the general availability of PostgreSQL 16. As this is a Beta, minor changes to database behaviors, feature details, and APIs are still possible. Your feedback and testing will help determine the final tweaks on the new features, so please test in the near future. The quality of user testing helps determine when we can make a final release.

A list of open issues is publicly available in the PostgreSQL wiki. You can report bugs using this form on the PostgreSQL website:

https://www.postgresql.org/account/submitbug/

Links

• Download
• Release Notes
• Security
• Versioning Policy
• Beta Testing Information
• PostgreSQL 16 Beta Release Notes
• PostgreSQL 16 Open Issues
• Follow @postgresql on Twitter
• Donate

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