Re: Max number of rows in a table

Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> Stephan Szabo <sszabo(at)megazone(dot)bigpanda(dot)com> writes:
>> I'd expect copy to be a single command, no matter how many rows were
>> copied.

> It might prevent you from using pg_dump --inserts ?

Not even that, unless you *also* modified the dump output to wrap
BEGIN/END around it. Otherwise each INSERT is a separate xid.

(Of course you could definitely take a pretty long coffee break while
waiting for a 4-billion-row table to be restored with INSERTs. Also
I think it would be necessary to run VACUUM partway through to avoid
transaction wraparound issues. pg_autovacuum could be expected to
take care of that for you, if it were running. But in practice anyone
sane would use COPY for this, anyway.)

regards, tom lane