Port Bug Report: pg_dump gets huge memory footprint (200MB and more)

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                        POSTGRESQL BUG REPORT TEMPLATE
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Your name        : Brian Hirt
Your email address    : bhirt@berkhirt.com

Category        : unknown
Severity        : non-critical

Summary: pg_dump gets huge memory footprint (200MB and more)

System Configuration
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  Operating System   : Linux 2.0.36

  PostgreSQL version : 6.4.2

  Compiler used      : gcc

Hardware:
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PII 400Mhz 128MB Mem, 5GB HD

Versions of other tools:
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Problem Description:
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Not really sure if this is a bug....

pg dump's memory footprint grows to a huge size and eventually dumps when you dump a large table (1,000,000+ rows,
250MB)from a remote machine.  This does not happen if the dump is performed from the local machine which pg_dump is
installedon. 

I have tracked down the source of the problem.  pg_dump does a select * from large_table.  It seems that the entire
resultset it created in memory before pg_dump does anything with it.  In fact this seems a side effect of the way
postgresworks since the same thing happens when I do a select * from large_table in psql. 

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Test Case:
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create a tabele with 1,000,000 rows and pg_dump it from a remote host

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Solution:
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Hmmm.... I have some ideas, but don't know postgres well enough.

Are there cursors that will allow the data to be retrieved bit by bit instead of one huge chunk?

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