Table partitioning

Sorry for not responding directly to your question and for changing
the subject ... ;-)

On 4 March 2011 18:18, Landreville <landreville(at)deadtreepages(dot)com> wrote:
> That is partitioned into about 3000 tables by the switchport_id (FK to
> a lookup table), each table has about 30 000 rows currently (a row is
> inserted every 5 minutes into each table).

Does such partitioning really make sense? My impression is that the
biggest benefit with table partitioning is to keep old "inactive" data
out of the caches. If so, then it doesn't seem to make much sense to
split a table into 3000 active partitions ... unless, maybe, almost
all queries goes towards a specific partitioning.

According to http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/ddl-partitioning.html
...

"Query performance can be improved dramatically in certain situations,
particularly when most of the heavily accessed rows of the table are
in a single partition or a small number of partitions. The
partitioning substitutes for leading columns of indexes, reducing
index size and making it more likely that the heavily-used parts of
the indexes fit in memory."

"All constraints on all partitions of the master table are examined
during constraint exclusion, so large numbers of partitions are likely
to increase query planning time considerably. Partitioning using these
techniques will work well with up to perhaps a hundred partitions;
don't try to use many thousands of partitions."

We have started an archiving project internally in our company since
our database is outgrowing the available memory, I'm advocating that
we should look into table partitioning before we do the archiving,
though it seems to be out of the scope of the project group looking
into the archiving. I'm not sure if I should continue nagging about
it or forget about it ;-)