Re: 1600 Column limit..

"Williams, Travis L, NPONS" <tlw(at)att(dot)com> writes:
> Is this set in stone.. or is there somewhere you can change this.. and
> will changing it cause upgrade problems in the future..

It is not easy to make a large increase in that limit. See the comments
in src/include/access/htup.h for some of the reasons why. You'd also
need a significant increase in block size to be able to do anything
useful. (For instance, if all your columns are int4, you surely can't
fit more than 2K columns in 8K blocksize.) Finally, the system is not
very well optimized for large numbers of columns --- even if you could
physically make things fit, there are various places whose runtime is
O(N^2) in the number of columns.

I agree with the nearby comments that say you should consider a database
redesign. If extremely wide tables were a standard design technique,
we'd not have allowed these limitations to accrue...

regards, tom lane