Timeseries: How long can the elephant remember?

Frankly, I don't know where the practical limit for the number of rows in a single PostgreSQL table is from experience, but the interwebs seems to agree on 10^9 for narrow tables.

After a lively discussion with a NoSQL afficionado yesterday about the (in)ability to effectively store timeseries data in a RDBMS I made a quick calculation.

Timeseries data is usually a triple of the form key timestamp value, so it can be stored in a pretty narrow table, hence I stick to the 10^9 rows limit.

If we get a data point every second, we can store 10^9 seconds worth of data. 10^9 seconds is 16666666.6667 minutes, which is 277777.777778 hours, which is 11574.0740741 days, which is good for about 31 years of recording.

Every second of 31 years. Per table.