Re: DELETE vs TRUNCATE explanation

Daniel Farina <daniel(at)heroku(dot)com> writes:
> TRUNCATE should simply be very nearly the fastest way to remove data
> from a table while retaining its type information, and if that means
> doing DELETE without triggers when the table is small, then it should.
> The only person who could thwart me is someone who badly wants their
> 128K table to be exactly 8 or 0K, which seems unlikely given the 5MB
> of catalog anyway.

> Does that sound reasonable? As in, would anyone object if TRUNCATE
> learned this behavior?

Yes, I will push back on that.

(1) We don't need the extra complexity.

(2) I don't believe that you know where the performance crossover point
would be (according to what metric, anyway?).

(3) The performance of the truncation itself should not be viewed in
isolation; subsequent behavior also needs to be considered. An example
of possible degradation is that index bloat would no longer be
guaranteed to be cleaned up over a series of repeated truncations.
(You might argue that if the table is small then the indexes couldn't
be very bloated, but I don't think that holds up over a long series.)

IOW, I think it's fine as-is. I'd certainly wish to see many more
than one complainant before we expend effort in this area.

regards, tom lane