Tom Lane wrote: > I do not buy that psql's FETCH_COUNT mode is a sufficient reason > to add it. FETCH_COUNT mode is not something you'd use > non-interactively
I should say that I've noticed significant latency improvements with FETCH_COUNT retrieving large resultsets, such that it would benefit non-interactive use cases. For instance, with the current v7 patch, a query like the OP's initial case and batches of 1000 rows: $ cat fetchcount-test.sql select repeat('a', 100) || '-' || i || '-' || repeat('b', 500) as total_pat from generate_series(1, 5000000) as i \g /dev/null $ export TIMEFORMAT=%R $ for s in $(seq 1 10); do time /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql -At \ -v FETCH_COUNT=1000 -f fetchcount-test.sql; done 3.597 3.413 3.362 3.612 3.377 3.416 3.346 3.368 3.504 3.413 => Average elapsed time = 3.44s Now without FETCH_COUNT, fetching the 5 million rows in one resultset: $ for s in $(seq 1 10); do time /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql -At \ -f fetchcount-test.sql; done 4.200 4.178 4.200 4.169 4.195 4.217 4.197 4.234 4.225 4.242 => Average elapsed time = 4.20s By comparison the unpatched version (cursor-based method) gives these execution times with FETCH_COUNT=1000: 4.458 4.448 4.476 4.455 4.450 4.466 4.395 4.429 4.387 4.473 => Average elapsed time = 4.43s Now that's just one test, but don't these numbers look good? Best regards, -- Daniel Vérité https://postgresql.verite.pro/ Twitter: @DanielVerite