If I were you I will use partitioning. In my experience, partitioning is easier and transparent. I just have to set it up and then refers just to one table and done.
About speed, if you have the value "constraint_exclusion" = partition, postgres will examine constraints only for inheritance child tables and UNION ALL subqueries and will improve the perfomance of your query
I am looking for some general advice about the best was of splitting a large data table,I have 2 different choices, partitioning or different schemas.
The data table refers to the number of houses that can be include in a city, as such there are large number of records.
I am wondering if decided to partition the table if the update speed/access might be faster that just declaring a different schema per city.
Under the partition the data table would appear to be smaller, so I should get an increase in speed, but the database still have to do some sort of indexing.
If I used different schemas, it resolves data protection issues, but doing a backup might become a nightmare