Re: Table partitioning for maximum speed?

Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to>

From: Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to>
To: Jeff Boes <jboes@nexcerpt.com>
Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Date: 2003-10-09T19:01:57Z
Lists: pgsql-general
On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 18:37:19 +0000,
  Jeff Boes <jboes@nexcerpt.com> wrote:
> I'm sure this is a concept that's been explored here. I have a table 
> (fairly simple, just two columns, one of which is a 32-digit checksum) 
> with several million rows (currently, about 7 million). About a million 
> times a day we do
> 
>   select * from my_table where md5 = ?
> 
> to verify presence or absence of the row, and base further processing on 
> that information.
> 
> The idea bandied about now is to partition this table into 16 (or 256, 
> or ...) chunks by first digit (or 2, or ...). In the simplest case, this 
> would mean:

If there is an index on the checksum column, then you shouldn't get
much of a speed up by partitioning the data.
If you don't have an index on the checksum, it sounds like you should.