On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 9:04 AM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
> christian_behrens@gmx.net wrote:
>
>
> > How can I make a Update of a column in a very large table for all rows
> > without using the double amount of disc space and without any need for
> > atomic operation?
> >
> > I have a very large table with about 60 million rows. I sometimes need
> > to do a simple update to ALL rows that resets a status-flag to zero.
>
> Perhaps you should rethink your data model.
for example:
*) change status-flag to a timestamp
*) make a new table (status_reset or something) with one column, one row...and
*) make a view (perhaps swapping names with your original table) that
joins the two tables and preserves the 1/0 status flag column
appearance so you don't have to change the app.
Consider the fundamental tenet: 'If PostgreSQL can't do it well, you
are probably doing it the wrong way' :-)
merlin
