Re: How Big is Too Big for Tables?

2010/7/28 Bill Thoen <bthoen(at)gisnet(dot)com>:
> 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.
>

AFAIK it could be just a matter of how much RAM do you have, DDL and
DML (aka queries).
Hitting the real PG limits it's quite hard, even in your case.

--
Vincenzo Romano
NotOrAnd Information Technologies
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