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From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Organization: Aglio Database Solutions
To: "Kumar" <sgnerd@yahoo.com.sg>
Subject: Re: Fw: Max input parameter for a function
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 09:33:44 -0700
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Kumar,

> While trying to allocate about 36 input parameters, I got an error saying
> that the max input parameter for a function is only 32.
>
> Is it right? How to overcome this? Because I wanna insert records into a
> table of 55 columns with a lot of NULL able columns.

First off, if your table has 55 columns and many are nullable, then you have a 
database design problem ... your database is not normalized.

Assuming that you can't fix your database, there's two methods you can take:

1) Rather than pushing in all of the columns as parameters, you can dump the 
record into a holding table (e.g. mytable_buffer) and then call a procedure 
to process the data there.

2) You can re-compile PostgreSQL to accept more parameters.  This requires:
	1. Backup your database cluster using pg_dumpall.  (make sure to 
double-check!)
	2. Shut down postgresql
	3. Delete the PGDATA directory
	4. Go into your postgresql source, and edit the file
		src/include/pg_config.h , and raise "INDEX_MAX_KEYS" to the desired level, 
                probably 64. Warning: This may impose a minor performance
                penalty on Postgres!
	5. Re-compile Postgres, starting with "make clean"
	6. Run initdb
	7. Restore your database cluster from the pg_dumpall file

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco