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To: "Gregory W Burnham" <gburnham@sfu.ca>
cc: pgsql-interfaces@postgreSQL.org
Subject: Re: [INTERFACES] Error Message 
In-reply-to: Your message of Thu, 22 Oct 1998 10:49:51 -0700
	<003001bdfde4$5f26efc0$3d063a8e@apemantus.educ.sfu.ca>
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 21:52:44 -0400
Message-ID: <8003.909107564@sss.pgh.pa.us>
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

"Gregory W Burnham" <gburnham@sfu.ca> writes:
> I'm getting the error:
> FATAL 1:  Socket command type
> But I can't find any referance to it anywhere.  This is for an INSERT
> query and the result returned from PQexec is NULL.

This is coming out of src/backend/tcop/postgres.c; it looks like the
backend got a NULL character at the point where it expected to read
the first byte of a new command string from the frontend.

My guess is that the frontend and backend got out of sync.  The easiest
way to make that happen is to mess up a COPY IN or COPY OUT sequence,
but it could also be that you have a broken frontend that's sending
garbage.

What frontend software are you using, anyway?  And what version?
What were you doing *before* the command on which you noticed the
failure?

			regards, tom lane