Re: wat is the max number of rows that can be returned

Joel Burton <joel(at)joelburton(dot)com> writes:
> And you're wondering what will happen if you write a query that returns
> more than 2 billion rows (2000 million)?

The first thing that will happen is that you'll run out of memory in the
client process to store all those rows in your PGresult.

You can handle ridiculously-large query results by opening a cursor
and fetching reasonable-sized chunks with FETCH; it might take awhile
but in theory you could process an indefinitely large result that way.

I don't think the int-sized result of PGntuples is going to be a issue
in the foreseeable future --- platforms that could hold >2G tuples are
no doubt going to use a wider size of int.

regards, tom lane