out of memory error on a delete command

Hi all,

I wonder what could cause such an exception (see below). I was executing
a "DELETE FROM table_name" command on a table with a lot of records (~
80 million). Now after the fact I realize I should have tried it in psql
too to see if it fails there too, but I truncated the tables in the
meantime via "TRUNCATE". The only reason I tried to do it via delete is
to see how many rows were deleted, but it looks like a bad idea...

Any enlightening thoughts ?

Cheers,
Csaba.

The (partial) stack trace:

org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: out of memory
        at
org.postgresql.core.v3.QueryExecutorImpl.receiveErrorResponse(QueryExecutorImpl.java:1471)
        at
org.postgresql.core.v3.QueryExecutorImpl.processResults(QueryExecutorImpl.java:1256)
        at
org.postgresql.core.v3.QueryExecutorImpl.execute(QueryExecutorImpl.java:175)
        at
org.postgresql.jdbc2.AbstractJdbc2Statement.execute(AbstractJdbc2Statement.java:389)
        at
org.postgresql.jdbc2.AbstractJdbc2Statement.executeWithFlags(AbstractJdbc2Statement.java:314)
        at
org.postgresql.jdbc2.AbstractJdbc2Statement.executeUpdate(AbstractJdbc2Statement.java:264)
[... our classes follow]