Re: Disable result buffering to frontend clients

Konstantinos Krikellas wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am trying to execute some queries in PostgreSQL that produce a large
> number of results and I do not want to display the output (redirect it
> to /dev/null). I have tried the psql client with \o /dev/null option,
> JDBC and libpq functions, but all of them have to buffer totally the
> result before redirecting it. Is there any way to disable result
> buffering, either on the client or on the server side?

Well, you could use a cursor, but that could change the plan (I believe
it favours plans that return the first result quickly).

You could have a function that used FOR-IN-EXECUTE to run a query for
you then just loop through the results, doing nothing. That would keep
everything server-side.

If you really want to duplicate all the query costs except client-side
buffering, the simplest might be to just hack the libpq source to
discard any query results rather than buffering them - shouldn't be too
difficult.

--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd