Re: [QUESTIONS] Business cases

On Sat, 17 Jan 1998, The Hermit Hacker wrote:

> On Sat, 17 Jan 1998, Tom wrote:
>
> > How are large users handling the vacuum problem? vaccuum locks other
> > users out of tables too long. I don't need a lot performance (a few per
> > minutes), but I need to be handle queries non-stop).
>
> Not sure, but this one is about the only major thing that is continuing
> to bother me :( Is there any method of improving this?

vacuum seems to do a _lot_ of stuff. It seems that crash recovery
features, and maintenance features should be separated. I believe the
only required maintenance features are recovering space used by deleted
tuples and updating stats? Both of these shouldn't need to lock the
database for long periods of time.

> > Also, how are people handling tables with lots of rows? The 8k tuple
> > size can waste a lot of space. I need to be able to handle a 2 million
> > row table, which will eat up 16GB, plus more for indexes.
>
> This oen is improved upon in v6.3, where at compile time you can stipulate
> the tuple size. We are looking into making this an 'initdb' option instead,
> so that you can have the same binary for multiple "servers", but any database
> created under a particular server will be constrained by that tuple size.

That might help a bit, but same tables may have big rows and some not.
For example, my 2 million row table requires only requires two date
fields, and 7 integer fields. That isn't very much data. However, I'd
like to be able to join against another table with much larger rows.

> Marc G. Fournier
> Systems Administrator @ hub.org
> primary: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org secondary: scrappy(at){freebsd|postgresql}.org

Tom