Oliver Seidel <postgresql@os10000.net> writes:
> I have
> create table x ( att bigint, val bigint, hash varchar(30)
> );
> with 693million rows. The query
> create table y as select att, val, count(*) as cnt from x
> group by att, val;
> ran for more than 2000 minutes and used 14g memory on an 8g physical
> RAM machine
What was the plan for that query? What did you have work_mem set to?
I can believe such a thing overrunning memory if the planner chose to
use a hash-aggregation plan instead of sort-and-unique, but it would
only do that if it had made a drastic underestimate of the number of
groups implied by the GROUP BY clause. Do you have up-to-date
statistics for the source table?
regards, tom lane
