Everyone,

I had an odd situation occur this morning with PGSQL 7.4 run on Red Hat Enterprise 4 (update 3) and could really use some wisdom.

... Single postmaster running.
... vacuum full is run every night as part of a cron job
... At start, data files consume about 28 GB
... This morning I dropped the database and reloaded from current backup
... New instance consumes about 6 GB

I can only assume that the database was not compacted, but I thought vacuum full performed that function along with tuple maintenance. Can anyone expound on the problem and suggest a solution other than dropping and reloading the database?

Thanks in advance