On Thursday 21 December 2006 11:47, Ron Johnson wrote: > This gives you linear growth potential, since if your current box > gets over-utilized, buy a 2nd box and move some of the databases to it. So far, I'm inclined to go this way, due to the option for linear scaling. > >> 2) Copy out the data specific to a customer and load into separate tables > >> (with slightly different names, EG table "dates" becomes "cust1_dates") > >> and > >> use data partitioning to help with performance as needed. > > Definitely *not* scalable. And *very* messy. Yech. Scales better than present, methinks, but still not the best idea. I'd have to revisit all my queries to make sure that they use the correct tablename. > > 3) Put each customer in their own schema/namespace which resides within > > its own table space. > > > > Then you can move customers wherever you need in terms of IO. How is that functionally different than using a separate database? What's the advantage here? I don't *need* to restrict myself to one database, and doing this does require that I revisit 100% of the SQL queries to make sure that I'm referencing the right schema. This solution seems to have the same problems as using dynamic tablenames. > Splitting like mentioned in these three tactics means that you've > now got 2x as many tables. Add more customers and you've got that > many more tables. Perfect candidate for "schema drift". > > If each table has cust_id in it, then you could: > > 4) retain 1 database and partition each table on cust_id. > > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/ddl-partitioning.html Intriguing idea, and one that I might do in the future. However, I have 170 normalized tables defined at present. The task of auditing each of these tables for the constraint ranges sounds somewhat nightmarish. Not all the tables have the cust_id record defined - some are implicit. > >> Given the same physical hardware, which one is likely to perform better? Does > >> it make any difference? Does using separate databases use more RAM than a > >> single database with a bunch of different tables? > > Config files are global, so I doubt it. > > >> Company is growing rapidly, so growth room is important... > > Then go for Option 1. My conclusion, too. Another poster mentioned schema drift, and that's a real concern, but we're already updating the schema through a script which could be extended to update all databases, not just one, so I feel this problem would be minor to non-existent. Thanks! -Ben -- "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - XEROX PARC slogan, circa 1978
