Re:

On Thu, 2009-09-24 at 07:33 -0700, Ms swati chande wrote:

> LOG: server process (PID 3304) was terminated by exception
> 0xC0000005
>
> The execution for this and other queries has been fine so
> far.
>
> What is exception 0xC0000005?

0xC0000005 is an "access violation". It means the program tried to
access memory it's not allowed to - usually memory it hasn't allocated
or a null pointer.

If you're willing to do some work you can find out exactly where it's
crashing by collecting some information about the crash. I wrote up some
instructions on this a while ago:

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Getting_a_stack_trace_of_a_running_PostgreSQL_backend_on_Windows

> I am working on Windows XP.
>
> Have built version 8.4.0 from source using Visual Studio
> 2005.

... in which case you should be able to easily use the Visual Studio
debugger to get a backtrace of the crash, as per the instructions:

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Getting_a_stack_trace_of_a_running_PostgreSQL_backend_on_Windows#Debugging_using_Microsoft_Visual_Studio_Express_Edition

(Ignore that the instructions refer to the 2009 express edition; it
makes no difference here).

Given that you've built Pg yourself, have you made sure you've installed
all the libraries you link to in the Pg program directory? Are you sure
Pg is running linked to the right DLLs for zlib, iconv, etc, not
different ones that happened to be on your PATH? You can check this
using Dependency Walker (depends.exe) from
http://dependencywalker.com/ , or by looking at the DLL linkage list
using Process Explorer from Sysinternals.

--
Craig Ringer