Re: vacuum full questions

From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
To: Kevin Grittner <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov>
Cc: Kevin Kempter <kevink(at)consistentstate(dot)com>, pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: vacuum full questions
Date: 2009-08-18 22:48:59
Message-ID: 20090818224859.GA5890@alvh.no-ip.org
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Kevin Grittner wrote:
> Kevin Kempter <kevink(at)consistentstate(dot)com> wrote:

> > 2) can I safely kill the vacuum full and do a dump, drop table,
> > restore instead?
>
> Killing a VACUUM FULL can leave the table or its indexes more bloated
> than when you started, but it should have no other negative impact. I
> have generally had to kill my attempts to VACUUM FULL and resort to
> other techniques to deal with extreme bloat.

Note that cancelling a VACUUM FULL is known to cause a database restart
(a.k.a. PANIC) if the circumstances are right, viz. that the initial
transaction committed. This is an unfixable bug (short of rewriting
vacuum full from scratch) and has been reported in the wild several
times.

--
Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.

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