Re: 7.4.6 pg_dump failed

The table contains postscript documents. My company prints and mails
about 50,000 pages of invoices each day for a customer. We are
experimenting with putting up a 7 year web based document archive for
their customers to cut mailing costs and make it easier for their
customers to take advantage of early pay discounts. The archive might
also be used for the customer service reps at the call centers.

I was able to truncate the table since this is experimental and most of
the data can be reconstructed after the upgrade to 8.0. The TEXT field
contains the postscript of each document. Some invoices are 10,000+
pages. The largest one I recall was about 200 MB in size.

If we do get this project rolling under Pg, I will still have the issue
with dumping. Perhaps it was the -d option that caused it. I
appreciate the feedback.

Marty

Tom Lane wrote:
> Marty Scholes <marty(at)outputservices(dot)com> writes:
>
>>A pg_dump of one table ran for 28:53:29.50 and produced a 30 GB dump
>>before it aborted with:
>
>
>>pg_dump: dumpClasses(): SQL command failed
>>pg_dump: Error message from server: out of memory for query result
>>pg_dump: The command was: FETCH 100 FROM _pg_dump_cursor
>
>
> Even though it says "from server", this is actually an out-of-memory
> problem inside pg_dump, or more specifically inside libpq.
>
>
>>The table contains a text field that could contain several hundred MB of
>>data, although always less than 2GB.
>
>
> "Could contain"? What's the actual maximum field width, and how often
> do very wide values occur? I don't recall the exact space allocation
> algorithms inside libpq, but I'm wondering if it could choke on such a
> wide row.
>
> You might have better luck if you didn't use -d.
>
> regards, tom lane