E.15.1. Migration to version 8.1.2

A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.1.X. However, you might need to REINDEX indexes on textual columns after updating, if you are affected by the locale or plperl issues described below.

E.15.2. Changes

• Fix Windows code so that postmaster will continue rather than exit if there is no more room in ShmemBackendArray (Magnus)

  The previous behavior could lead to a denial-of-service situation if too many connection requests arrive close together. This applies only to the Windows port.

• Fix bug introduced in 8.0 that could allow ReadBuffer to return an already-used page as new, potentially causing loss of recently-committed data (Tom)

• Fix for protocol-level Describe messages issued outside a transaction or in a failed transaction (Tom)

• Fix character string comparison for locales that consider different character combinations as equal, such as Hungarian (Tom)

  This might require REINDEX to fix existing indexes on textual columns.

• Set locale environment variables during postmaster startup to ensure that plperl won't change the locale later

  This fixes a problem that occurred if the postmaster was started with environment variables specifying a different locale than what initdb had been told. Under these conditions, any use of plperl was likely to lead to corrupt indexes. You might need REINDEX to fix existing indexes on textual columns if this has happened to you.

• Allow more flexible relocation of installation directories (Tom)

  Previous releases supported relocation only if all installation directory paths were the same except for the last component.

• Prevent crashes caused by the use of ISO-8859-5 and ISO-8859-9 encodings (Tatsuo)

• Fix longstanding bug in strpos() and regular expression handling in certain rarely used Asian multi-byte character sets (Tatsuo)

• Fix bug where COPY CSV mode considered any \. to terminate the copy data

  The new code requires \. to appear alone on a line, as per documentation.

• Make COPY CSV mode quote a literal data value of \. to ensure it cannot be interpreted as the end-of-data marker (Bruce)

• Various fixes for functions returning RECORDs (Tom)

• Fix processing of postgresql.conf so a final line with no newline is processed properly (Tom)

• Fix bug in /contrib/pgcrypto gen_salt, which caused it not to use all available salt space for MD5 and XDES algorithms (Marko Kreen, Solar Designer)

  Salts for Blowfish and standard DES are unaffected.

• Fix autovacuum crash when processing expression indexes

• Fix /contrib/dblink to throw an error, rather than crashing, when the number of columns specified is different from what's actually returned by the query (Joe)