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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Maybe most apps never see the problem of hitting the row limit because the devs spend time beforehand thinking about which limitations they're likely to hit.

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It's definitely possible, but the limit is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 rows, or 281 terabytes, whichever the database hits first, so you probably could put the discussion off until year 2 or 3 if you really had to.

Kind of like maybe the 'Send your friends money, divide the restaurant bill easily!' app founders first think will change the world could get really popular if it gets on the frontpage of HN..

I have a feeling you will long before experience other problems that makes likely you have to migrate to a different storage system before you hit that limit.

Given it's ~2 billion rows for every person the planet I reckon so.

Other than Facebook who has 2 billion rows for every person the planet (tongue in cheek).

Telemetrics and sensors data could (at least theoretically) produce billions of row per hour per single sensor.

I work on such a system and one of the things we do is figure out which of that sensor data to throw away. In most cases the change between measures is too small to be worth saving, and because we have less data saved we can analyse it faster and thus do something useful with it. The purposes of all that data isn't to fill storage, it is to allow making useful decisions based on it. If you can't make a better decision based on sensor input then don't save it.

Long before you hit any row limit you will have performance problems because you have far too many rows to process in a reasonable amount of time. If you think about this problem and ensure you don't have too much data to process the row limit is so absurdly high you will never hit it.

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