Re: records chaining

I'am migrating from "single-user" database (Clarion - TopSpeed) to
PostgreSQL. I'am newbie not only in PostgreSQL but in SQL also.
With previouse database handling it was important to keep database files
relativelly short "chunks":
  - single-user is always draw hole database file to the client;
  - archiving is very comfortable - 500 Mbyte pen drive was enough to draw
all news;
  - now speed penalty for growing database files (I met SQL system where
every year
    datas should be moved to an "archive", because of the painfull speed -
not PostgreSQL).
The system, what I planning is receiving short binary messages from some
thousend of different sources, after converted to hex ASCII it's about 30
Mbyte of  ASCII string, in old system, in a quarter received about 8,000,000
messages - records.
I would like to automate every year moving the database, keep it that way to
get "archive" from the same application, to give the user easy way to get
"messages" from 5 or more years old.
The hardware is not choosen. I will do that, but of course I need to keep a
realistic budget, and the accent should be on reliability, based not on
clustering but on flexibility. That means I need keep large database in easy
to handle size(s) - mirrored...
The record "chaining" is need to keep track changing of  sources database,
where always are large fluctuation and modification - some hundred of
records in a month. I've should track what and who and when changed the
record!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Eckermann" <jeff_eckermann@yahoo.com>
To: "tövis" <tovises@freemail.hu>; <pgsql-novice@postgresql.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 3:59 PM
Subject: Re: [NOVICE] records chaining


> This message, along with your previous one, suggests
> that you are trying to limit the size of your tables.
> Is there any good reason for this?  How many records
> do you expect to have?  What hardware will you be
> running on?
>
> --- tövis <tovises@freemail.hu> wrote:
>> I need record changing history. Of course I need to
>> keep old records, and some how point to it for show
>> changes. First of my idea is to make a single column
>> in every record pointing to his "parent" but after I
>> started thinking how SQL can handle it. Whats your
>> opinion, is it possible to write a recursive SELECT
>> to get all records back to that whats parent
>> reference has no reference (NULL)? At this moment I
>> would be happy to know that is it possible - I'm
>> only planning and migrating an old database, the
>> coding seem to be "far" away.
>> Thanks in advance
>>     Gábor Rózsa
>>
>>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Plan great trips with Yahoo! Travel: Now over 17,000 guides!
> http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide
>