PostgreSQL: Visibility Map Bug Fixed, Old Baggage Dropped
A multi-commit fix from Melanie Plageman closes a data-corruption gap in incremental backups caused by unregistered visibility map writes, while a separate batch of commits strips support for aging platforms like Tcl 8.5, ICU pre-55, and old Visual Studio compilers.
Duration: PT2M40S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from PostgreSQL.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: PostgreSQL
- Published: 2026-07-16T13:04:11Z
- Audio duration: PT2M40S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good morning. It's July 16th, 2026, and this is your PostgreSQL briefing.
The lead story today is a correctness fix touching incremental backups and vacuum. Melanie Plageman's commit ed62d26 fixes a bug where heap operations that clear visibility map bits — think inserts and deletes — never registered the visibility map buffer with the WAL machinery. Since the WAL summarizer only tracks…
This didn't land in isolation. Commit 2340fb8 cleaned up the visibility map clearing function to take a real relation file locator instead of a fake relcache stand-in, paving the way for the fix. Commit 10911fd introduced named macros for WAL block reference IDs, replacing bare integers, because the fix now…
The second theme is housekeeping: Peter Eisentraut removed support for old dependencies now that RHEL 7 is off the support list. That includes requiring ICU 55 or later, dropping Visual Studio versions before 17.3, and — briefly — requiring Tcl 8.6. That last one, commit b6d3ccf, was reverted almost immediately in…
Smaller fixes: a documentation gap around the REPACK command and the maintain privilege, and a corrected error message in pgbench's client-count flag.
What to remember: if you rely on…
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