Re: PQntuples returns an int.

On Mar 3, 2010, at 10:05 AM, Guillaume Yziquel wrote:

> Hello.
>
> I've been looking at the PQntuples function, in section 29.3.2. 'Retrieving query result information' of
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/interactive/libpq-exec.html
>
> The declaration is:
>
>> int PQntuples(const PGresult *res);
>
> I'm wondering: why the 'int'? why not a 'long int', or an 'unsigned int', or whatever?
>
> I'm asking this because I'm wondering whether you could have more tuples in the result of a query than could be indexed by the 'int' type. May this happen?

That's returning the number of tuples you've already retrieved and have in memory on the client.

I'm not sure what the overhead in storage is, but if you have more than two billion tuples in your result set you're probably going to blow out of memory long before you get there (and should be using a cursor instead).

Cheers,
Steve