Did you know that Postgres has a max table size of 32TB? Its really really fun to find that out the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving.

Make sure to prune old data from your tables. This one got to this limit because it eventually got too large that queries to delete old data would time out... so it just kept growing.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/limits.html

I just put a maximum Postgres table size I’m willing to manage in my employment contract. By the time we’re measuring in Terabytes I’m out of there.

For an interesting presentation on Postgres at different orders of magnitude, all the way up to petabytes, see https://thebuild.com/presentations/2019-fosdem-broken.pdf

Wow. That is still pretty large for one table.

Everyone has a testing environment. Some people even have separate production environments.

Production is the best testing environment after all.

I don't always test my code. But when I do, I test it in production. -The Most Interesting Man in the World

For 90%+ of our customers (small-to-mid sized US financial institutions), production is the only environment available to work with.

For the other 10%, we take them aside and politely explain that they almost certainly have an unusable staging environment per the scope of our B2B project.

Testing in production is a wonderful path if you are comfortable talking to business people and making lots of compromises.