To: pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
Subject: Rather incorrect text in admin guide
From: Michael Graff <explorer@flame.org>
Date: 27 Dec 2000 08:09:27 -0800
Message-ID: <v6ito5977s.fsf@kechara.flame.org>
Lines: 22


In the admin guide, under the section "Large Databases" is the
following paragraph:

	Since Postgres allows tables larger than the maximum file size
	on your system, it can be problematic to dump the table to a
	file, since the resulting file will likely be larger than the
	maximum size allowed by your system. As pg_dump writes to the
	standard output, you can just use standard *nix tools to work
	around this possible problem.

This is a generalization of, most likely, a failing in linux.

NetBSD (which I use) will allow file sizes up to 2^64 -- I don't think
anyone has generated a postgresql database that large yet.

You might want to qualify that with "Operating systems which support
64-bit file sizes (such as NetBSD) will have no problem with large
databases" or "some operating systems are limited to 2-gigabyte files
(such as linux)"

--Michael