Sorry, but I better use this email address, I just hate to use Outlook for this stuff.

To Peter Eisentraut

Yes, I've read the chapter in the manual.

To Michael Glaesemann

locally I run the database on my laptop (Dell D800) 1 GB Ram, but there within VMWARE with 512MB assigned RAM. But the target platform is a dual processor machine with 2 GB.

But, and thats the big but here, I don't care. For me a database has to work satisfying in the first place without twiddeling some obscure knobs or push levers to get just accaptable performance if I only have a small set of data. Heck, I'm talking about maybe in the whole 45.000 records!!! I mean I used Interbase, MySQL, SQLite, SQLServer before, and for this project postgres was set, so I had to use it. Which is fine, I wouldn't mind, if I would not have such troubles.

Which I'm working on is just a redesign of a database which has some hysterically grown tables. Not much in it, but there are some tables which should be merged together and some others have to split up. No big deal. So my basic idea was to use the flexibility of rules to provide a transparent interface to the frontend, which has the big advantage of not having to change the frontend in most places at all. We have a bit of a homegrown framework (PHP) to show and manipulate the data on the frontend side. Unfortunately it is only easy if you access 1 table, and don't have to update several tables. So my idea was to use the rule system as well to put the data into the database and distribute it on the underlying tables. To have views which separate the physical model from the logical model. This is best practice isn't it? Unfortunately it seems no way to create triggers on views, which is what I need. Some insert rules are not enough, because I'm using data which is just created, so this is not an option. Ok as a workaround I create a table which is just there to have a insert trigger on it to distribute the data on the tables. For selecting, updating, and deleting the rules are sufficient.

So I actually merging some tables with appr. 8000 + 14,000 + 30,000 records in it, so we talking about a small database. The performance of selecting data from the views is slow, I mean there are only around 50000 records in there in the whole. It can take up to several seconds to get the data from the views, which is just not fast enough. The update is even slower, for just updating 1 record it takes ages.

The actual migration process, of moving the old data to the new tables is just agonizing slow. To move tha data from the small table (8000 entries) it takes somewhere (not deterministic) between a few minutes and 40 minutes to move it. Essentually it is just a select from one table to the compatibility view of the new table. For me it seems that each additional row makes the database slower. It occured to me that either table (8000 or 14000 entries) is faster migrated if it happens to be the first of both. Then migrating the 30000 entries (and it has to be the last one) takes **hours**!!!

The migration of the tables itself consists of two parts, first move the data from the table, than update all the linked tables (I had to remove the joins, they have to point afterwards to the new tables), at this point I'm using a lot of subselects (which are slow but there is no other way).

And I actually vacuum and analyze the database after each step, all usefull indices are set and also used.

I did some serious stuff with SQLServer and Interbase, and I had **never** those performance problems.

enough of ranting, but I'm totally frustrated
with best regards
Jürgen

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