The benefits will normally be worthwhile only when a table would
otherwise be very large. The exact
point at which a table will benefit
from partitioning depends on the
application, although a rule of thumb
is that the size of the table should
exceed the physical memory of the
database server.
Currently, PostgreSQL supports partitioning via table inheritance. Each partition must be created as a child table of a single parent table. The parent table itself is normally empty; it exists just to represent the entire data set. You should be familiar with inheritance (see Section 5.8) before attempting to implement partitioning.