Re: Disk buffering of resultsets

Wow... really glad Tom chimed in on this. I've been promoting/using PG
as an enterprise-class database for over a decade and I was struggling with
the "fact" that the server doesn't iterate thru a cursor without bringing
it all into memory.

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 8:46 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> John R Pierce <pierce(at)hogranch(dot)com> writes:
> > this still won't address the issue that the postgresql server itself
> > ALSO marshals the entire result set into ITS memory before sending it to
> > the client.
>
> If it actually did that, then there would be an issue ... but it never
> has, and very likely never will. The server sends rows on-the-fly as
> they're computed. That is indeed the very reason that client libraries
> tend to want to accumulate full resultsets: they're hiding that behavior
> from applications, so as to make it look like you get either an error or
> a full resultset, not some rows and then an error.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
>
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