## E.257. Release 8.1.2

Release date: 2006-01-09

This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.1.1. For information about new features in the 8.1 major release, see Section E.259.

### E.257.1. 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.257.2. 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 `RECORD`s (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)