Re: reproducible database crash with simple sql command on postgres 8.3.1

<Christian(dot)Strobl(at)dlr(dot)de> writes:
> PANIK: ERROR_STACK_SIZE exceeded

> the rest of the message is unfortunately in german then i have to
> restart the postgres-service manually this error is very easy
> reproducible at my environment

What this typically means is that you've got an encoding/locale
configuration problem. The thing is trying to report some error
or other, and it discovers that the error text is badly encoded
according to the current database encoding, and it tries to
report that, only *that* error text is badly encoded too, so
it tries to report that, getting another error, etc, until the
error recovery stack overflows.

The hope of getting rid of this scenario is one reason why we locked
down encoding/locale combinations in 8.3, so I'm disappointed that
you're still able to make it happen. You didn't say what settings
you are using though. Could we see

show lc_messages;
show lc_ctype;
show server_encoding;
show client_encoding;

regards, tom lane