Gene, at Postgres's docs they say that the "constraint checks are relatively expensive". From what you're saying, it's really worth studying the matter deply first. I never understood what's the matter between the ASCII/ISO-8859-1/UTF8 charsets to a database. They're all simple C strings that doesn't have the zero-byte in the midlle (like UTF16 would) and that doesn't require any different processing unless you are doing case insensitive search (them you would have a problem). ASCII chars are also correct UTF8 chars as well. The first 127 Unicode chars are the same as the ASCII chars. So you would not have any problems changing your table from ASCII to UTF8. My software uses UTF16 and UTF8 at some of it's internals and I only notice performance problems with UTF16 (because of the zero-byte thing, the processing I make is diferent). So, I imagine that you wouldn't have any performance issues changing from ASCII to UTF8 if necessary. Nowadays everything is turning to Unicode (thank god). I wouldn't start anything with any other charset. I would only be asking for a rewrite in a near future. Best, Daniel On 12/10/06, Gene <genekhart@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm using gentoo as well, I'm having performance issues as the number of partitions is increasing I imagine do due to overhead managing them and figuring out where to put each insert/update. I'm switching to weekly partitions instead of daily. I believe in PG8.2 constraint exclusion works with updates/deletes also so I'm eager to upgrade. I get about 1 million records per day in two tables each, each record updated about 4 times within 30 minutes. Do you think using UTF8 vs US-ASCII hurts performance signficantly, some of my smaller tables require unicode, and I don't think you can have some tables be unicode and some be ASCII.
