Re: Followup Question about Vacuum from newsgroup

HT Levine <htlevine(at)ebates(dot)com> writes:
> My suspicion is that there are pg_toast_xxxxx files left in the base
> directory? If I identify them with oid2name (waiting for netops to build
> that) is it ok to just delete those toast files?

No.

In pre-7.3 releases, TRUNCATE TABLE did not automatically truncate the
associated TOAST table, which was a nasty oversight :-(. However, those
releases would also allow you to manually truncate a TOAST table (which
was also a bad oversight, but rather fortunate in hindsight). The bad
news is that they think TOAST tables are system tables --- so the only
way to fully truncate a toastable table in 7.2 is

TRUNCATE TABLE toast-table-for-foo;
TRUNCATE TABLE foo;

in a standalone backend started with -O option :-(

This mess is fixed in 7.3 --- TRUNCATE automatically truncates the toast
table along with its master, when you truncate the master.

regards, tom lane