Re: very large tables

Hello list,

I will try to make this as brief as possible.

I have a brother who is a scientist studding atmospheric problems.   He was trying to handle all of his data with flat files and MatLab, when I stepped in and said, wait, you need a RDBMS to handle all this data.

So, he basically has 2 very simple tables, one describing an atmosphere pixel (latitude, longitude and height) and a couple of other simple values.  The other table has values of different variables meassured at each pixel.

The table with the atmosphere pixels, currently has about 140MM records, and the one the values about 1000MM records.   They should both grow to about twice this size.

I have not started yet to deal with the largest table, I am only doing test with the smaller one (140MM rows), and they much slower than what we were expecting.

A simple query with no joins like this:

select trajectory from atmospherepoint where moment='1979-05-02 11:45:00' and height >= 12000 and height <= 14000 and longitude >= 180 and longitude <= 190 and latitude >= 0 and latitude <= 10;

is taking almost 4 minutes in a decent multi core server.  Also, the moment equality test should yield no more than 2MM rows, so I thought that should make things a lot faster.

The explain returns the suspicious "Seq Scan" up front:

Seq Scan on atmospherepoint  (cost=0.00..5461788.08 rows=134 width=8)

   Filter: ((moment = '1979-05-02 11:45:00'::timestamp without time zone) AND (height >= 12000::double precision) AND (height <= 14000::double precision) AND (longitude >= 180::double precision) AND (longitude <= 190::double precision) AND (latitude >= 0::double precision) AND (latitude <= 10::double precision))

but I have created indices for every column in the table and I have also runned ANALIZE and VACUUM:

           Table "public.atmospherepoint2"

   Column   |            Type             | Modifiers 

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

 id         | integer                     | not null

 trajectory | integer                     | not null

 moment     | timestamp without time zone | not null

 longitude  | real                        | not null

 latitude   | real                        | not null

 height     | real                        | not null

Indexes:

    "atmospherepoint2_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)

    "atm_height_idx" btree (height)

    "atm_latitude_idx" btree (latitude)

    "atm_longitude_idx" btree (longitude)

    "atm_moment_idx" btree (moment)

    "atm_trajectory_idx" btree (trajectory)

Foreign-key constraints:

    "atmospherepoint2_trajectory_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (trajectory) REFERENCES trajectory2(id)

I will welcome a lot any advice or pointer on how to tune these tables to work faster.

The tables don't change at all once the data has been loaded, they are only used for queries.

Thank you very much.

r.