Re: Decreasing performance in table partitioning

Instead of deleting from the original non-partition table which is not efficient, you can try below approach.

 

Put below logic in a function as you like:

 

Create a new partition table.

Insert data from original non-partition table to the correct partition of new partition table.

Build index and analyze as needed.

Rename old non-partition table to something else.

Rename new partition table to the correct name as you wanted.

 

Drop old non-partition table if you’re satisfied with current table structure.

 

Thanks,

Suya

From: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Herouth Maoz
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2014 12:00 AM
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: [GENERAL] Decreasing performance in table partitioning

 

Hello all.

 

I have created a function that partitions a large table into monthly partitions. Since the name of the table, target schema for partitions, name of the date field etc. are all passed as strings, the function is heavily based on EXECUTE statements.

 

My problem is the main loop, in which data for one month is moved from the old table to the partition table.

 

(1)

            EXECUTE FORMAT (

                'WITH del AS (

                     DELETE FROM %1$I.%2$I

                     WHERE %3$I >= %4$L AND %3$I < %5$L

                     RETURNING *

                 )

                 INSERT INTO %6$I.%7$I

                 SELECT * FROM del',

                p_main_schema,

                p_table_name,

                p_date_field_name,

                v_curr_month_str,

                v_curr_month_to_str,

                p_partition_schema,

                v_partition_name

            );

 

In the first few iterations, this runs in very good times. But as iterations progress, performance drops, despite the size of the date for each month being more or less the same. Eventually I end up with iterations that run for hours, when I started with only a few minutes. The odd thing is that the last iteration, which is actually for a month not yet inserted into that table (0 records to move) it took 6 hours for the above statement to run!

 

I tried to improve this, by first testing whether there are any records for the current month in the table, adding:

 

(2)

 

        EXECUTE FORMAT (

            'SELECT true

             FROM %1$I.%2$I

             WHERE %3$I >= %4$L AND %3$I < %5$L

             LIMIT 1',

            p_main_schema,

            p_table_name,

            p_date_field_name,

            v_curr_month_str,

            v_curr_month_to_str

        ) INTO v_exists;

 

Before the above statement, and putting it in an IF statement on v_exists. Also, after each move, I added:

 

EXECUTE FORMAT ( 'ANALYZE %I.%I', p_main_schema, p_table_name );

 

But to no avail. In fact, in each iteration, the execution of statement 2 above takes more and more time.

 

Here is the number of rows in each month for the table I was trying to partition:

 

  count   |      the_month      

----------+---------------------

 10907117 | 2013-08-01 00:00:00

 12715234 | 2013-09-01 00:00:00

 14902928 | 2013-10-01 00:00:00

 10933566 | 2013-11-01 00:00:00

 11394906 | 2013-12-01 00:00:00

  9181051 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00

  8487028 | 2014-02-01 00:00:00

  9892981 | 2014-03-01 00:00:00

  8830191 | 2014-04-01 00:00:00

  8368638 | 2014-05-01 00:00:00

  8014685 | 2014-06-01 00:00:00

  6780589 | 2014-07-01 00:00:00

 

 

And the times for each iteration:

 

Month    Statement 2  Statement 1

2013-08  3 sec        3 min

2013-09  2 min        17 min

2013-10  4 min        21 min

2013-11  8 min        20 min

2013-12  9 min        32 min

2014-01  16 min       21 min

2014-02  19 min       20 min

2014-03  14 min       23 min

 

For April I had to cancel it in the middle. My problem is that I can't let this run into the evening, when we have backup followed by large data collection. These times are just for the given statements, and additional time is spent creating indexes on the partitions and so on. So this thing ran from 11:24 until I had to cancel it at around 6PM.

 

Can anybody explain the performance deterioration and/or offer a suggestion for a different design?

 

TIA,

Herouth