Claire McLister <mclister@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > This was all working fine until E.Value became some large strings > with some occasional funny characters. > The hack that solved the problem was: > R.Field := substring(E.Value from 1); > This is a complete hack, so I'd like to find out what is going > wrong and why this worked. For now, it keeps the system functional. Oooh. You were probably dealing with values that had gotten large enough to be "toasted", ie, stored out-of-line in a TOAST table. So the datum being passed around in memory was just a pointer to the row in the TOAST table. Dropping the temp table made its TOAST table go away, resulting in a dangling pointer stored in the plpgsql variable. The easy fix would be to forcibly detoast any value stored into a plpgsql variable, but the performance implications of that seem a bit nasty. Not sure I want to do it for such a weird corner case... regards, tom lane
