I wrote:
>> This looks like a pgadmin bug ...
> Looking at it, I'm betting somebody thought this was a cute way to
> set bytea_output if it exists, without getting a failure on servers
> too old to have it. We added that in 9.0, so maybe it's not quite
> old enough to make it a moot point; but failing on RO servers is
> not nice either. Anyway, yeah, it's pgadmin's problem to fix.
Better idea:
select set_config('bytea_output','escape',false) from pg_settings where name = 'bytea_output';
This is depressingly lacking in safe schema-qualification, btw.
regards, tom lane