Re: Feedback on getting rid of VACUUM FULL

Hannu,

> The only case is when you are out of disk space and can't afford to
> write out a full set of live rows.

Well, it's actually rather specific. You need to have:

a) *Some* free disk space (FULL requires extra disk) but not enough to
copy one entire table and its indexes.

b) be already down or willing to accept the long downtime which comes
with FULL more than you're willing to go out and get some extra disk or
move your database to a new share.

There's no question that this combination is fairly circumstantial and
represents a minority of potential vacuum cases. Unfortunately, it does
seem to represent some real-life ones, so we have to take those into
account.

> What I'd like to propose is VACUUM FULL CONCURRENTLY, which similar to
> VACUUM CONCURRENTLY, would actually do the compaction phase, that is,
> move simultaneously from two directions, from start, to find empty space
> and from end to find tuples. for each sufficiently large empty space the
> forward scan finds it would take one or more tuples from the reverse
> scan and then "null update" those to the empty space found by the
> free-space-scan beginning. it should do that in small chunks, say one
> page at a time, so it will minimally interfere with OLTP loads.

How would this work with HS?

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com