Re: Feedback on getting rid of VACUUM FULL

On Wed, 2009-09-16 at 21:23 +0300, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

> I was just going to post that we should make a decision about this,
> because ISTM there's some code in Simon's hot standby patch that is only
> required to support VACUUM FULL. If we make the decision that we drop
> VACUUM FULL in 8.5, we can take that part out of the patch now. It's not
> a huge amount of code, but still.
>
> I'm in favor of removing VACUUM FULL in 8.5. To replace it, we should offer:
>
> 1) VACUUM REWRITE, which is like CLUSTER but doesn't use an index, and
> 2) Another utility that does something like UPDATE ... WHERE ctid > ? to
> move tuples to lower pages. It will be different from current VACUUM
> FULL in some ways. It won't require a table lock, for example, but it
> won't be able to move update chains as nicely. But it would be trivial
> to write one, so I think we should offer that as a contrib module.

I have not checked, but I suspect pg_reorg may already be doing
something similar http://pgfoundry.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=1561

> --
> Heikki Linnakangas
> EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

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