On the limitations page it states various maximums for PostgreSQL, but I don't see an explicit reference to the maximum number of tables, a question that has come up before.
I'm guessing that the maximum number of tables is related to how much can be stored in the pg_ tables which track the names and information of the various fields in the database.
So, based on that, the maximum number of rows is unlimited and the maximum size for a table is 64 TB. So realistically, you would need an enormous number (trillions) of tables to exceed that limit, and of course the actual storage of those tables themselves would use up your disk long before you ran out of room in the pg_ tables.
So I'm assuming there is no practical limit on the number of tables in a given database.
In looking through the pg_ tables though, I don't see one that specifically lists table names. Is there one? Is some information perhaps stored on disk in the base, global, or clog areas?
We currently have a system with 100 GB of data and about 1000 tables. We are designing it such that there will be multiple machines in parallel, and then within each machine a given Virtual table is broken down into many smaller tables, so we will typically have about 1000-10,000 tables per database.
We'd be curious to hear of anyone who has pushed these limits further.
Thank You,
Shane Brubaker & the Transcriptome group