Trying to determine the best overall approach for the following scenario: Each month our primary table accumulates some 30 million rows (which could very well hit 60+ million rows per month by year's end). Basically there will end up being a lot of historical data with little value beyond archival.
The question arises then as the best approach of which I have enumerated three: 1) Just allow the records to accumulate and maintain constant vacuuming, etc allowing for the fact that most queries will only be from a recent subset of data and should be mostly cached. 2) Each month: SELECT * INTO 3monthsago_dynamically_named_table FROM bigtable WHERE targetdate < $3monthsago; DELETE FROM bigtable where targetdate < $3monthsago; VACUUM ANALYZE bigtable; pg_dump 3monthsago_dynamically_named_table for archiving; 3) Each month: CREATE newmonth_dynamically_named_table (like mastertable) INHERITS (mastertable); modify the copy.sql script to copy newmonth_dynamically_named_table; pg_dump 3monthsago_dynamically_named_table for archiving; drop table 3monthsago_dynamically_named_table; Any takes on which approach makes most sense from a performance and/or maintenance point of view and are there other options I may have missed? Sven Willenberger ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq