On Jan 2, 2008 10:40 AM, Chris Hoover <revoohc@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Is there a limit to the number of partitions a table can have in PostgreSQL? > > The reason I as is we are looking again at partitioning our databases with > the possibility of doing the partitioning by year, month, or even day. > However, we are required by HIPPA to keep 7 years of data, and we are > planning on maintaining the data online in our databases. While I can't > imagine year or month being a problem, 7 years of daily partitions would be > 2555+ partitions per table. Can PostgreSQL handle this many partitions per > table? Is that feasible, or would the cost of the rules become to expensive > to be feasible? That's a LOT of partitions, but it's definitely doable. However, under no circumstances should you maintain that many partitions with rules. Triggers are a much better choice (usually anyway) for large numbers of partitions. There are a few things you can do to alleviate the issue. One is to put older data sets into larger partitions. Since they are accessed less often, it's not as big of a deal if it takes an extra second to get to the data in one. That was when a query runs, it doesn't have to check the exclusion constraints of 2555 partition tables, just 40 or 50. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
