On Sunday, March 31, 2013, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> A different line of thought is that you might have set work_mem to
> an unreasonably large value --- the sort step will happily try to
> consume work_mem worth of memory.
>
I don't think that that can be the problem here, because memtuples can
never be more than 1GB even if work_mem is much larger than that. Even if
his sort is using pass-by-reference (I don't think it would be), they
should be skinny enough that that limitation should prevent it from blowing
out memory.
Cheers,
Jeff