One table or many tables for data set - Mailing list pgsql-performance

Hi all,

I'm working on a project that has a data set of approximately 6million rows
with about 12,000 different elements, each element has 7 columns of data.

I'm wondering what would be faster from a scanning perspective (SELECT
statements with some calculations) for this type of set up;
    one table for all the data
    one table for each data element (12,000 tables)
    one table per subset of elements (eg all elements that start with
"a" in a table)

The data is static once its in the database, only new records are added on a
regular basis.

I'd like to run quite a few different formulated scans in the longer term so
having efficient scans is a high priority.

Can I do anything with Indexing to help with performance?  I suspect for the
majority of scans I will need to evaluate an outcome based on 4 or 5 of the
7 columns of data.

Thanks in advance :-)

Linz