Re: Database Scalability

In an attempt to throw the authorities off his trail, jagan(at)syringacommunications(dot)com ("M.V. Jaga Mohan") transmitted:
> I am using PgSQL 7.3 for my Application. My problem how can I scale
> my database ? I mean how many records I can have in my database.

That depends mainly on how much disk space you have. If you haven't
got much disk, you won't be able to store many records. If you have
8TB of free space, you should be able to store rather a lot, depending
on how large they might be.

> and what will be the data retreival speed when multiple clients
> access the database. Is there any software or mechanism to find out
> this ?

Retrieval speed will depend on various things, including:

- How fast your disk subsystem is;
- How much data you can cache in memory;
- How effectively you have tuned PostgreSQL's use of caches
- How useful the set of indices are on your tables
- How efficient the queries you have written for data retrieval
are at utilizing all of the above.

You would likely find that 7.4 releases would be quite a bit faster
and more efficient than the 7.3 series, due to various improvements to
the query planner, and possibly that the new version 8.0 is even
faster still. I find it curious that you want to use so old a version
of PostgreSQL.
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