Re: Newbie questions relating to transactions

Carl Sopchak <carl(dot)sopchak(at)cegis123(dot)com> writes:
> I have written a PL/pgSQL function that performs these calculations by reading
> the needed data, calculating, and saving the results. When run over a
> smaller set of data, it works fine. But when I tried to run it over this
> larger set of data, I got the error message "ERROR: cannot have more than
> 2^32-1 commands in a transaction".

> I have looked into trying to control the transaction within my function, but
> apparently this results in nested transactions, which is not supported by
> pgsql 8.2 (my current version).

Try updating to 8.3 --- it only counts plpgsql statements as separate
"commands" if they actually modified something on-disk. The 2^32 limit
is still there but it's a lot harder to hit.

regards, tom lane