Re: How Big is Too Big for Tables?

You should look at table partitioning. That is, you make a master
table and then make a table for each state that would inherit the
master. That way you can query each state individually or you can query
the whole country if need be.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/ddl-partitioning.html

On 7/28/2010 12:09 PM, Bill Thoen wrote:
> I'm building a national database of agricultural information and one
> of the layers is a bit more than a gigabyte per state. That's 1-2
> million records per state, with a mult polygon geometry, and i've got
> about 40 states worth of data. I trying to store everything in a
> single PG table. What I'm concerned about is if I combine every state
> into one big table then will performance will be terrible, even with
> indexes? On the other hand, if I store the data in several smaller
> files, then if a user zooms in on a multi-state region, I've got to
> build or find a much more complicated way to query multiple files.
>
> So I'm wondering, should I be concerned with building a single
> national size table (possibly 80-100 Gb) for all these records, or
> should I keep the files smaller and hope there's something like
> ogrtindex out there for PG tables? what do you all recommend in this
> case? I just moved over to Postgres to handle big files, but I don't
> know its limits. With a background working with MS Access and bitter
> memories of what happens when you get near Access' two gigabyte
> database size limit, I'm a little nervous of these much bigger files.
> So I'd appreciate anyone's advice here.
>
> TIA,
> - Bill Thoen
>