On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Kevin Galligan <kgalligan(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> I'm approaching the end of my rope here. I have a large database.
> 250 million rows (ish). Each row has potentially about 500 pieces of
> data, although most of the columns are sparsely populated.
A couple of notes here. PostgreSQL stores null values as a single bit
in a bit field, making sparsely populated tables quite efficient as
long as you store the non-existent values as null and not '' or some
other real value.
Have you run explain analyze on your queries yet? Pick a slow one,
run explain analyze on it and post it and we'll see what we can do.