On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 6:48 AM, Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> It's best when working with big sets to do so with a cursor and fetch
> a few thousand rows at a time. It's how we handle really big sets at
> work and it works like a charm in keeping the client from bogging down
> with a huge memory footprint.
>
You can do \set FETCH_COUNT to have psql use a cursor automatically.
--
greg