Re: Preventing or controlling runaway queries

Eric E <whalesuit@gmail.com> writes:
>     I've recently had a couple worrisome experiences with runaway
> queries in postgres 7.4 and 8.0, and I'm wondering what I can do to
> control or prevent these.  When I ran a query against a large table, I
> accidentally omitted mistyped a table name, and a table was
> automatically added, resulting in a massive result set that crash my
> postmaster instance.

If it crashed your backend (as opposed to your client), we'd like to
see more details.

> Is there some way to limit the amount of
> memory a single query process can use?

See ulimit.

            regards, tom lane