"Henry" <henry at zen.co.za> writes:
> On Fri, February 29, 2008 4:17 am, Craig A. James wrote:
>> What's really amazing is that Postgres works at all with five million
>> tables.

> Hats off to the PG devs (sorry for the unsolicited CC Tom, but you *had*
> to know about this).

ROTFL ... actually, it doesn't surprise me that PG can handle 5M tables;
we do have indexes on the system catalogs ya know.  What is a bit
surprising is that your filesystem didn't fall over with 5M files in the
same directory.

I have heard that some newer filesystems contain what are effectively
btree indexes on the contents of a directory.  That strikes me as a bit
stupid, since surely the design center for a filesystem is not zillions
of files per directory.  But as a database we're definitely supposed to
handle zillions of rows per table, and that applies to pg_class and
related catalogs just as much as any other table.

Interesting story in any case.  I guess pg_dump still needs work ;-)

			regards, tom lane