Thanks Gavin -- would LOVE to. Sadly I'm in a weird situation where my hardware is not under my control, so I'm stuck making the best of what I have. Next time though! :)
On Monday, April 14, 2014, Gavin Flower <
GavinFlower@archidevsys.co.nz> wrote:
On 15/04/14 09:46, Nick Eubank wrote:
Any rules of thumb for work_mem, maintenance_work_mem, shared_buffer, etc. for a database that DOESN'T anticipate concurrent connections and that is doing lots of aggregate functions on large tables? All the advice I can find online on tuning (this, this, this etc.) is written for people anticipating lots of concurrent connections.
I'm a social scientist looking to use Postgres not as a database to be shared by multiple users, but rather as my own tool for manipulating a massive data set (I have 5 billion transaction records (600gb in csv) and want to pull out unique user pairs, estimate aggregates for individual users, etc.). This also means almost no writing, except to creation of new tables based on selections from the main table.
I'm on a Windows 8 VM with 16gb ram, SCSI VMware HD, and 3 cores if that's important.
Thanks!
Well for serious database work, I suggest upgrading to Linux - you will get better performance out of the same hardware and probably (a year or so ago, I noticed some tuning options did not apply to Microsoft O/S's, but I don't recall the details - these options may, or may not, apply to your situation) more scope for tuning. Apart from anything else, your processing will not be slowed down by having to run anti-virus software!
Note that in Linux you have a wide choice of distributions and desktop environments: I chose Mate (
http://mate-desktop.org), some people prefer xfce (
http://www.xfce.org), I used to use GNOME 2.
Cheers,
Gavin