Re: database size growing continously

Peter Meszaros wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I use postgresql 8.3.7 as a huge queue. There is a very simple table
> with six columns and two indices, and about 6 million records are
> written into it in every day continously commited every 10 seconds from
> 8 clients. The table stores approximately 120 million records, because a
> cron job daily deletes those ones are older than 20 day.
You may be an ideal candidate for table partitioning - this is 
frequently used for rotating log table maintenance.

Use a parent table and 20 child tables. Create a new child every day and 
drop the 20-day-old table. Table drops are far faster and lower-impact 
than delete-from a 120-million row table. Index-bloat is limited to 
one-day of inserts and will be eliminated in 20-days. No deletes means 
no vacuum requirement on the affected tables. Single tables are limited 
to about 6-million records. A clever backup scheme can ignore 
prior-days' static child-tables (and you could keep 
historical-data-dumps off-line for later use if desired).

Read up on it here: 
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/ddl-partitioning.html

Cheers,
Steve