Re: column size too large, is this a bug?

Thanks a lot! We were migrating to Postgres from Oracle and
every now and then, we ran into something that we do not
understand completely and it is a learning process for us.

Your responses have made it much clear for us. BTW, do you
think that it's better for us just to rewrite everything so we don't
need to use the patch at all? Why do others still use it?

Thanks!

Qing
On Mar 25, 2004, at 6:04 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>>> Oh, good eye ... it's that infamous CONNECT BY patch again, without
>>> doubt.
>
>> Hey, who does this patch? What's wrong wiith it?
>
> I'm just venting my annoyance at people expecting us to support
> hacked-up versions, especially without telling us they're hacked-up.
> This is the third or fourth trouble report I can recall that was
> eventually traced to that patch (after considerable effort).
>
> Anyway, my guess for the immediate problem is incorrect installation of
> the patch, viz not doing a complete "make clean" and rebuild after
> patching. The patch changes the Query struct which is referenced in
> many more files than are actually modified by the patch, and so if you
> didn't build with --enable-depend then a simple "make" will leave you
> with a patchwork of files that have different ideas about the field
> offsets in Query. I'm a bit surprised it doesn't just dump core...
>
> (That's not directly the fault of the patch, though, except to the
> extent that it can be blamed for coming without adequate installation
> instructions. What is directly the fault of the patch is that it
> doesn't force an initdb by changing catversion. The prior trouble
> reports had to do with views not working because their stored rules
> were
> incompatible with the patched backend. We should not have had to deal
> with that, and neither should those users.)
>
> Theory B, of course, is that this is an actual bug in the patch and not
> just incorrect installation. I'm not interested enough to investigate
> though.
>
> regards, tom lane
>