Setting Up and Implementing Partitioning for Optimized Database Performance-Postgres

Ramesh Ponnusamy
4 min readSep 2, 2024

Partitioning is crucial when dealing with transaction data (such as credit, debit, audits, etc.), especially when you’re handling millions of records each month. Querying the entire table to extract just three months of data from ten years’ worth of records can significantly slow down performance, creating a bottleneck. In such situations, partitioning can be a lifesaver. The goal of this blog is to explain how to implement partitioning on a transaction table, step by step.

Photo by Joel Dunn on Unsplash

Create the sales table with partitioning, ensuring that the partition key is included as part of the primary key combination.

CREATE TABLE sales (
id SERIAL ,
product_id INT NOT NULL,
sale_date DATE NOT NULL,
amount DECIMAL(10, 2) NOT null,
PRIMARY KEY (id, sale_date)
) PARTITION BY RANGE (sale_date);

We need to manually create the child partition tables, as the database won’t automatically create them for us.

For testing purposes, we’ll create three partition tables, each representing one month. We’ll name these tables in a meaningful way that reflects the data they contain.

create table sales_2024_01 partition of sales for values from ('2024-01-01') to ('2024-02-01');

create table sales_2024_02 partition of…

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