Re: 4 billion record limit?

brad writes:

> I don't want to start a war but I must agree here... I recoil when the
> argument is put forward for a "you will never use that up" approach.
> The best that I can offer is: Oh yeah? Seen some of the Beowulf clusters
> around recently?

I don't want to participate in a war, either, but consider this:

* At a conservative estimate, the Universe is 3e+17 seconds old.

* 2^64 is 2e+19, about 100 times larger.

So, if you're going to be creating 100 objects a second, for the next 10
billion years, you'll hit that 64-bit OID limit.  Or, if you create 5
billion objects a second, you'll hit the limit in only 100 years.

Now let's assume that Moore's Law holds true for number of objects
created per second, in a PG database.  Let's further assume that the
current limit is 1000.  So, in 18 months, the limit would be 2000
objects per second.  In how many years would the limit actually reach
the 5 billion I spoke of?  I calculate 22 doublings, which works out
to 33 years.

So, assuming these numbers are reasonable, and assuming that Moore's
Law applies to PG usage, we could have trouble with 64-bit OIDs in
maybe 40 years.

I'm not trying to be inflammatory here; just trying to add some
relatively objective numbers to the discussion.  Feel free to correct
my numbers.

Chris

--
---------------------------------------------------- cjones@rightnowtech.com
Chris Jones
           System Administrator, RightNow Technologies
"Is this going to be a stand-up programming session, sir, or another bug hunt?"