Re: fetching bytea (blob) data of 850 MB from psql client failed

On 8/31/22 09:27, John Naylor wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 1:02 PM jitesh tiwari <jitesh120@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi John,
>> Thanks for those details.
>> The database table for bytea columns has binary data data and some are not text. Hence, when it tried to fetch by changing the bytea_output to 'escape' it failed again with the below error -
>> VERROR; result of bytea output conversion is too large(File varlena.c; Line 415; Routine byteaout; ).
>> BTW, is there any plan to fix this issue in the PostgreSQL backend code in near future?
>
> Unfortunately, there is no plan as there is no consensus on how to
> approach the issue. It seems the possible actions are (easiest to
> hardest):
>
> 1. Document that bytea is unsafe  -- you can insert anything you like,
> but you may be unable to retrieve it again.
> 2. Determine some maximum size that guarantees accessibility and
> invent a GUC that by default prevents inserting larger values than
> that.
> 3. Fix the issue properly.
>
> #2 and #3 are challenging for reasons given in the thread I linked to above.
>

I haven't tried, but wouldn't it be enough to fetch the data in smaller
chunks? The application would have to re-assemble that, of course.

regards

--
Tomas Vondra
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company