Postgres: limiting table or database growth?

Question

We had a database spin itself out of control and fill the SAN partition it was sharing with other services. In some other RDBMSen, there are ways to disable autogrowth. I've not found that approach (yet) with Postgres. Putting aside the problem database that caused this mess...

What is your approach to preventing or limiting table/database growth in Postgres? Or is there one?

"...there exists no size limitation except physical boundaries placed on the device by the OS."
Ref. http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_for_Oracle_DBAs

Thanks muchly.

Answer 1

Monitoring. And manual (or automated, depending on your preference) reaction on situations.

Monitoring of course should be done automatically - Nagios, Cacti, whatever you like.

Answer 2

Monitoring, as depesz has said already, and enforcing it by specifically not sharing the partition with other services. As long as PostgreSQL is on it's own partition, it won't affect anybody else. And this is generally a good idea from a performance perspective as well.