Re: Need to update all my 60 million rows at once without transactional integrity

am Mon, dem 21.04.2008, um 0:19:34 +0200 mailte christian_behrens(at)gmx(dot)net folgendes:
> Hi!
>
> How can I make a Update of a column in a very large table for all rows without using the double amount of disc space and without any need for atomic operation?
>
> I have a very large table with about 60 million rows. I sometimes need to do a simple update to ALL rows that resets a status-flag to zero.
>
> I don't need to have transactional integrity (but of course if the system crashes, there should be no data corruption. A separate flag in the file system can well save the fact that that bulk update was in progress) for this, I don't care or want a abort or "all or nothing" like SQL mandates. The idea is basically that either this update succeeds or it succeeds or - there is no "not". It must succeed. It must be tried until it works. If the update is halfway finished, that's okay.
>
> If I just do an
> UPDATE table SET flag=0;
> then Pg will make a copy of every row which must be cleaned up by vaccuum. I understand - and don't like during this specific problem - that PG is a MVCC database and will keep my old versions of the rows before the update alive. This is very bad.
>
> If I do a batched loop like this:
> UPDATE table SET flag=0 where id>=0 and id <200;
> UPDATE table SET flag=0 where id>=200 and id <400;
> UPDATE table SET flag=0 where id>=400 and id <600;

Don't forget to VACUUM after every Update...

>
> Is there any other way to go?

Update to 8.3 and profit from the new HOT feature (wild guess: there is
no index on this flag-column)

Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
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