Re: Truncate table at a certain size.

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 4:05 AM, Dana Huggard - Navarik <
dhuggard(at)navarik(dot)com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> What would be the best method to truncate a table once it reaches a
> certain size.
>
> For instance, a table named log. I can check the size of the log;
>
> db=# select pg_relation_size('log');
> pg_relation_size
> ------------------
> 8192
> (1 row)
>
>
> What I would like to do is
>
> If table log, is greater than xxxx bytes
> then truncate table log
>

No, you wouldn't want to do this.... First and foremost, SQL (and Postgres)
does not guarantee that the new rows you are inserting land at some specific
point in storage; so you can't really be sure which part you want to
truncate.

But by design, in an ever growing table, Postgres puts new rows at the tail
end; so even with this knowledge you don't want to truncate the table,
because your older rows are towards the head/beginning of th table and not
at the tail.

Maybe I'll dump it to a flat file first, (yes, it should really be a
> flat file to start with, and not in a db.)
>
>
Yes, that'd be a better approach; use two files of fixed size, and cycle
between them (much like how Postgres deals with it's transaction logs (in
pg_xlog/)).

Best regards,
--
gurjeet[(dot)singh](at)EnterpriseDB(dot)com
singh(dot)gurjeet(at){ gmail | hotmail | indiatimes | yahoo }.com

EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

Mail sent from my BlackLaptop device