"John Liu" <johnl(at)emrx(dot)com> writes:
> the query worked before on the old installations,
> now also core dump in the old installations [I can't think of
> any settings' changes, the olnly change is the volume of the data
> increased],
Hmm ... are you approaching 2Gb of data in the dump? If so maybe you
forgot to enable large-file support when building pg_dump. A short-term
workaround might be to enable compression of the dump, but in the long
run you'd best rebuild.
regards, tom lane