Thanks for your reply, > FATAL is probably a bad choice of words here; it basically means any > error condition reported by the server that caused execution of your > query to be abandoned. NONFATAL_ERROR actually means "notice or > warning message", and isn't a possible return code from PQexec anyway. Just for anyone else wondering about this in the future, I found that PGRES_FATAL_ERROR can be a simple situation such as your query having a syntax error, or as serious as an outright database shutdown (i.e. connection lost).
