[singron]

If the old versions of records stay where they are, they will start to dominate heap pages and lead to a kind of heap fragmentation. If the records are still indexed, then they will create an enormous index bloat. Both of these will make caches less effective and either require more RAM or IOPS, both of which are scarce in a relational db.

You probably need a drastically different strategy, like moving old records to separate cold storage instead (assuming you might ocassionally want to query it. Otherwise you can just retain your WAL files forever).

[zmmmmm]

Absolutely ... it needs to be designed from the ground up - why I think it fits the question of something a modern database could do that Postgres would struggle with.

[5e92cb50239222b]

> moving old records to separate cold storage

FWIW this is available in ClickHouse (which is an analytics database, though)

https://clickhouse.tech/docs/en/engines/table-engines/merget...