Re: Sudden increase in n_dead_tup with no corresponding insert/update/delete

> On Jun 3, 2025, at 6:23 PM, David Rowley <dgrowleyml(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 4 Jun 2025 at 07:22, Matthew Tice <mjtice(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> Tue 03 Jun 2025 07:13:11 PM UTC (every 1s)
>> n_dead_tup | 5038
>> autoanalyze_count | 3078
>
>> Tue 03 Jun 2025 07:13:12 PM UTC (every 1s)
>> n_dead_tup | 1290579
>> autoanalyze_count | 3079
>
>> I don't understand where this large increase is coming from when there are no corresponding inserts, updates, or deletes (at the magnitude). This entire process repeats itself and, as mentioned, the same thing is happening on other observed tables.
>
> I imagine it's from the auto-analyze that ran. Analyze will try to
> estimate the live and dead rows, but since analyze only samples some
> blocks, it may come up with something that's not too accurate if the
> blocks it happened to sample don't contain similar percentages of dead
> rows than the entire table.
>
> See [1].
>
> David
>
> [1] https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/REL_15_STABLE/src/backend/commands/analyze.c#L1318

Thanks, David.

This table is relatively large (1.6B records, 1.5TB, 38 columns). The `default_statistics_target` is set to 300 - so I think that 90000 may not be enough to gather accurate statistics.