I can’t say for certain from the detail you’ve given, but partial indexes may be an acceptable solution to your problem.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/indexes-partial.html
From: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Roy Souther
Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2006 12:45 PM
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: [GENERAL] Is there a way to run tables in RAM?
I would like to know if there is anyway to move a section of some tables into RAM to work on them.
I have large table, about 700MB or so and growing. I also have a bizarre collection of queries that run hundreds of queries on a small section of this table. These queries only look at about 100 or so records at a time and they run hundreds of queries on the data looking for patterns. This causes the program to run very slowly because of hard drive access time. Some times it needs to write changes back to the records it is working with.
Is there anyway that I can move a few hundred records of the table into RAM and work on it there, it would be much faster.
Is there anyway to create a temporary table that will only exist in RAM and not be written to the hard drive? Or do temporary tables already do that?
If I can use a temporary table this way is there any simple way to merge the changes back into the original table?