Re: why there is not VACUUM FULL CONCURRENTLY?

On 2024-Jan-30, Pavel Stehule wrote:

> One of my customer today is reducing one table from 140GB to 20GB. Now he
> is able to run archiving. He should play with pg_repack, and it is working
> well today, but I ask myself, what pg_repack does not be hard to do
> internally because it should be done for REINDEX CONCURRENTLY. This is not
> a common task, and not will be, but on the other hand, it can be nice to
> have feature, and maybe not too hard to implement today. But I didn't try it

FWIW a newer, more modern and more trustworthy alternative to pg_repack
is pg_squeeze, which I discovered almost by random chance, and soon
discovered I liked it much more.

So thinking about your question, I think it might be possible to
integrate a tool that works like pg_squeeze, such that it runs when
VACUUM is invoked -- either under some new option, or just replace the
code under FULL, not sure. If the Cybertec people allows it, we could
just grab the pg_squeeze code and add it to the things that VACUUM can
run.

Now, pg_squeeze has some additional features, such as periodic
"squeezing" of tables. In a first attempt, for simplicity, I would
leave that stuff out and just allow it to run from the user invoking it,
and then have the command to do a single run. (The scheduling features
could be added later, or somehow integrated into autovacuum, or maybe
something else.)

--
Álvaro Herrera PostgreSQL Developer — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"We're here to devour each other alive" (Hobbes)