First: THANK YOU everyone for all your suggestions.
I've discovered the "copy from" command and it helps a lot.
Right now, we just ran a test on 1MM rows with 4 columns and it is very
fast with a 4 column index. Works well.
Now we are creating more of a real world example: 10MM rows with 32
columns of integers. I'm loading up the data now, and will create a
multi-column index(on all 32) after the data is loaded.
From everyone's responses I understand that we really need to tune the
system to get optimal performance. I would love to do this, but don't
really know where to start. Below are our system stats if anyone wants
to suggest some settings:
2x AMD 2100MP CPU
2 GB RAM
Data - 350GB on a raid5 card
Note: We will probably NEVER use transactions, so turning off that
feature would be fine if it would help, and we knew how.
Our data is probably only going to take up 20% MAXIMUM of our RAID.
Subsequently, we have no problem trading a little extra space for
better performance.
BTW - is there any kind of "describe table" and/or "show index"
function if pgsql. I've gotten very used to them in Mysql, but they
don't work here. There must be some way. I've RTFM, but can't find
anything. help.
THANKS AGAIN,
-Noah
