Re: Query memory usage

Tom Duffey <tduffey@trillitech.com> writes:
> I have a table with several hundred million rows of timestamped
> values.  Using pg_dump we are able to dump the entire table to disk no
> problem.  However, I would like to retrieve a large subset of data
> from this table using something like:

> COPY (SELECT * FROM history WHERE timestamp > '2009-01-01') TO STDOUT;

> Executing this query causes our server to consume all available swap
> and crash.

What's being done on the client side with the data?  AFAIK that
operation really shouldn't consume a lot of memory on the server side.
It would help if you'd be more specific about which process is consuming
swap space.

            regards, tom lane