On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 4:05 AM, Dana Huggard - Navarik <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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,
-- 
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