Re: postgres on a PDA

"Al Bean" <albean84(at)hotmail(dot)com> writes:
> My PDA has 32MB of RAM (well more like 16 with the way Sharp allocates it)
> and I use a 256MB FLASH memory card which sort of looks like a hard drive on
> the PDA. I know postgresql will run in about 8MB of RAM so I think I should
> be ok on this front but I'm wondering about the data residing in
> FLASH.

Postgres has kind of gotten away from the notion of a small disk
footprint :-(. Some things to look at:

* Definitely reduce the size of WAL segments (see XLogSegSize). You
can't afford the default 16MB.

* You probably don't want to have multiple databases. I'd suggest doing
all your work in template1. Consider also dropping template0 --- its
only value would be to reinit template1, and if you need to do that you
might as well re-initdb.

But I fear the real problem is going to be that FLASH memory has a
limited lifetime (measured in write cycles). Postgres is going to spend
that lifetime with abandon, because it has absolutely no motivation to
avoid disk writes. Are you prepared to replace the FLASH every so
often?

regards, tom lane