efficiently trimming postgresql tables

Posted by agilefall on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by agilefall
Published on 2010-04-19T23:16:23Z Indexed on 2010/04/19 23:23 UTC
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Filed under:

postgresql

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foreign-keys

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efficiency

I have about 10 tables with over 2 million records and one with 30 million. I would like to efficiently remove older data from each of these tables.

My general algorithm is:

create a temp table for each large table and populate it with newer data
truncate the original tables
copy tmp data back to original tables using: "insert into originaltable (select * from tmp_table)"

However, the last step of copying the data back is taking longer than I'd like. I thought about deleting the original tables and making the temp tables "permanent", but I lose constraint/foreign key info.

If I delete from the tables directly, it takes much longer. Given that I need to preserve all foreign keys and constraints, are there any faster ways of removing the older data?

Thanks.

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