This is great information. You just wrote the main content of Chapter #11
for "Storage Management". Now I understand how to employ some sort of file
management. Thanks.
At 11:14 AM 10/4/01 -0500, Brian McCane wrote:
>On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Chris Pesko wrote:
>
> > Thank you for responding and here is a follow up question regarding your
> > scalability answer. Is the database size limited to the size of the one
> > disk it rides on. Or does the directory volume need to be configured to
> > span multiple disks to get some scalability?
> >
>---------------->8 SNIP 8<------------------
>Chris,
>
> If you are asking if it is possible for a database to grow from
>one filesystem to another, the answer is currently "NO". However, as was
>already pointed out, you can put the files anywhere and use symbolic links
>to the files. I have distributed my largest database across 5 drives on
>2 separate SCSI busses at this point. I have placed index files on 2
>disks, and table files on 2 others, and the WAL files on another (7.1.2
>unpatched). The goal has been to reduce disk latency during updates to
>the tables for large multi-table transactions, and it has worked quite
>nicely. The only real problem has been that I needed to write a script
>that warns me whenever a table grows beyond 1GB. The new file
>(ie. 64587393.1) is created in $PGDATA and I then move it to whichever
>drive I have the master file (ie. 65487393) on. I could automate the
>whole thing using the perl script, but this would mean having the script
>automagically do a 'pg_ctl stop', move the file to a pre-defined
>drive, create the link, 'pg_ctl start'. Since I do this manually during
>low system usage times, and I don't trust the script to work 100% of the
>time, I just do it by hand.
>
>- brian
>
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