Re: Allow sorts to use more available memory

On 9/12/2011 3:58 PM, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:33 AM, Robert Schnabel
> <schnabelr@missouri.edu>  wrote:
>> The recent "data warehouse" thread made me think about how I use work_mem
>> for some of my big queries.  So I tried SET work_mem = '4GB' for a session
>> and got
>>
>> ERROR: 4194304 is outside the valid range for parameter "work_mem" (64 ..
>> 2097151)
> Ubuntu 10.10, pgsql 8.4.8:
>
> smarlowe=# set work_mem='1000GB';
> SET

Ok, so is this a limitation related to the Windows implementation?

And getting back to the to-do list entry and reading the related posts,
it appears that even if you could set work_mem that high it would only
use 2GB anyway.  I guess that was the second part of my question.  Is
that true?