Re: [HACKERS] Problems with >2GB tables on Linux 2.0

"D'Arcy" "J.M." Cain <darcy(at)druid(dot)net> writes:
> Thus spake Tom Lane
>> I'd suggest setting the limit a good deal less than 2Gb to avoid any
>> risk of arithmetic overflow. Maybe 200000 8K blocks, instead of 262144.

> Why not make it substantially lower by default?

Configure-time option, anyone ;-) ?

> Makes it easier to split
> a database across spindles. Even better, how about putting extra extents
> into different directories like data/base.1, data/base.2, etc?

This could be a pretty good idea. Right now, if you need to split a
database across multiple filesystems, you have to do a bunch of tedious
hand manipulation of symlinks. With an option like this, you could
automatically distribute your larger tables across filesystems...
set up the subdirectories as symlinks once, and forget it...

regards, tom lane