optimizing advice

dear all,

I am building a database that will be really huge and grow rapidly. It
holds data from satellite observations. Data is imported via a java
application. The import is organized via files, that are parsed by the
application; each file hods the data of one orbit of the satellite.
One of the tables will grow by about 40,000 rows per orbit, there are
roughly 13 orbits a day. The import of one day (13 orbits) into the
database takes 10 minutes at the moment. I will have to import data back
to the year 2000 or even older.
I think that there will be a performance issue when the table under
question grows, so I partitioned it using a timestamp column and one
child table per quarter. Unfortunately, the import of 13 orbits now
takes 1 hour instead of 10 minutes as before. I can live with that, if
the import time will not grow sigificantly as the table grows further.

anybody with comments/advice?

tia,
Ruediger.