Postgresql – How to put one table on one disk and anther table on another (a ramdisk)

You can save on the delete and vacuum if you will use smart partitioning! Make sure your design is compatible with dropping partitions instead of actual DELETE.

If you mix the history data in with the current like that in order to speed up queries over a time period, you do so at the expense of slowing down queries for current data. You can add an extra column to explicitly mark the relevant rows as the current prices (and have id+flag as the PK) but that adds extra work to your business logic to both keep it maintained and respect it in all reports.

Of course if you move the price completely out of the main table you have a similar problem in finding the latest price becoming more expensive unless you have a "latest" flag or do-normalise slightly and keep a copy of the current price in the main table as well as the price history table. Personally I would do the latter, and use a trigger on that product table to automatically update the price history table when a new product is added or the price updated (I'm assuming the products tables does no see massive write activity most of the time so the performance impact of using a trigger here should be minimal) in order to remove that auditing task from your other logic to avoid bugs caused by new code turning up that forgets to update the history/audit.

_{Caveat: I'm answering this from a general PoV as I've not used postgres much in anger, so do some benchmarks before taking anything I've said regarding performance as fact in that system!}