Re: VACUUM FULL memory requirements

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 5:53 PM, David Schnur <dnschnur(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Is my understanding of VACUUM v.s. VACUUM FULL correct, actually?  It
> appears to work that way, but the docs are a little vague on whether plain
> VACUUM ever frees actual disk space, or just reclaims it for the DB.

Basically. VACUUM does check to see if there just happens to be some
space at the end of the file it can truncate off but it doesn't go out
of its way to create such space. VACUUM FULL actually moves all the
tuples at the end of the file to earlier free spots. Moving tuples in
Postgres is really really hard because it has to be transaction-safe
and requires exclusive locking.

--
greg