Re: BUG #3898: Postgres autovacuum not respecting pg_autovacuum.enabled = false

On 1/23/08, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> "Steven Flatt" <steven(dot)flatt(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > I noticed that the Postgres autovacuum process was vacuuming some tables
> > that had enabled = false in pg_autovacuum.
>
> I think what is happening is that because you set
> pg_autovacuum.freeze_max_age to zero, the thing always thinks that it's
> time to force an anti-wraparound vacuum.
>
> In any case, you should be setting "unused" fields of a pg_autovacuum
> entry to -1, not zero.

Ah, I see. Thanks.

On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 00:01 -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> IMO it's a usability bug which will be gone when we move to
> pg_class.reloptions -- you won't need to set random values for options
> you don't know what to set to.

Or alternatively, and this is surely a moot point now, have the
numeric columns in pg_autovacuum be nullable (or default value of -1
even)? NULLs would assume the global default. After setting vacrelid
and enabled = false, it felt awfully kludgy to have to populate the
rest of the columns with zeros (now -1's).

Steve