Re: [HACKERS] [bug-fix] Cannot select big bytea values (~600MB)

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 2:17 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> +1. We don't have to support everything, but things that don't work
>> should fail on insertion, not retrieval. Otherwise what we have is
>> less a database and more a data black hole.
>
> That sounds nice as a principle but I'm not sure how workable it really
> is. Do you want to reject text strings that fit fine in, say, LATIN1
> encoding, but might be overlength if some client tries to read them in
> UTF8 encoding? (bytea would have a comparable problem with escape vs hex
> representation, for instance.) Should the limit vary depending on how
> many columns are in the table? Should we account for client-side tuple
> length restrictions?

I suppose what I really want is to have a limit that's large enough
for how big the retrieved data can be that people stop hitting it.

> Anyway, as Alvaro pointed out upthread, we've been down this particular
> path before and it didn't work out. We need to learn something from that
> failure and decide how to move forward.

Yep.

--
Robert Haas
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