Re: Strategies/Best Practises Handling Large Tables

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 5:46 AM, Chitra Creta <chitracreta@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you all.

Ryan, would you mind sharing your one-time function to move it?

Merlin, what are your suggestions to improve query performance?

Shaun, thank you. I will look into facts and dimensions should all else fail.

Chris, would you mind giving me an example of what you mean by your log, aggregate and snapshot approach. Also, with indexing, I believe composite and partial indexes are better than indexes, am I correct? Do you have any recommendations as to which type (e.g btree, hash) is better for which situations.

Sure.  Suppose I have an accounting system.

I may record the amounts in the transactions in a journal_entry and journal_line table.   These will be write once read many.  However time you will end up having to digest millions of records (given sufficient volume) to find out the balance of a checking account, and this is not really ideal.

So to deal with this, I might, for example, add a table called account_checkpoint which might have the following fields:

account_id

end_date

debits

credits

balance

And then I can snapshot on closing of books the accumulated debits, credits, and balance to date.  If I need any of these numbers I can just grab the appropriate number from account_checkpoint and roll forward from end_date.  If I have too much volume I can have closings on a monthly level of whatever.

The checkpoint table contains sufficient information for me to start a report at any point and end it at any other point without having to scan interceding checkpointed periods.  Additionally if I want to purge old data, I can do so without losing current balance information.

So what this approach does, in essence is it gives you a way to purge without losing some aggregated information, and a way to skip portions of the table for aggregation purposes you can't skip otherwise.  The big thing is you cannot insert (and if this is in doubt, you need to enforce this with a trigger) any records effective before the most recent checkpoint.

Best Wishes,

Chris Travers