Yang Zhang <yanghatespam@gmail.com> writes:
> I'm relieved that Postgresql itself does not, in fact, suck, but
> slightly disappointed in the behavior of psql. I suppose it needs to
> buffer everything in memory to properly format its tabular output,
> among other possible reasons I could imagine.
That's half of it, and the other half is not wanting to present a
portion of query output if the query fails partway through. You could
certainly write a client that disregarded these issues (as I suppose
mysql must be doing).
regards, tom lane