To avoid minimize risk inside the postmaster, we subject this feature
to a number of significant limitations.  We very much wish to avoid
doing any complex processing inside the postmaster, due to the
posssibility that the crashed backend has completely corrupted shared
memory.  To that end, no encoding conversion is done; instead, we just
replace anything that doesn't look like an ASCII character with a
question mark.  We limit the amount of data copied to 1024 characters,
and carefully sanity check the source of that data.  While these
restrictions would doubtless be unacceptable in a general-purpose
logging facility, even this limited facility seems like an improvement
over the status quo ante.

Marti Raudsepp, reviewed by PDXPUG and myself