Re: [PATCH] vacuumdb: Add --exclude-database option

On 10/6/26 11:41 AM, Khoa Nguyen wrote:
> Traditionally, databases are large and hosted in silos serving
> critical applications. These critical-application requirements are
> still there but I'm starting to see more databases being hosted on the
> same cluster for the purpose of lower resource overhead. These are
> generally AI produced tools/applications/reports running on cron jobs
> that do need persistent stores. I have not seen the scale of 5,000+
> databases as mentioned in Parallelizing startup with many databases
> but I'm seeing the requirement for co-location increasing. This
> proposed command option can definitely help when working with
> multi-database clusters.
>
> I think this is a useful addition to vacuumdb and I hope we can get it
> through. Please let me know if I can be of any assistance.
>
> -Khoa
>
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2026 at 9:36 AM Khoa Nguyen <kdnguyen9(dot)oss(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 17, 2026 at 7:24 PM Ben Mejia
>> <benjamin(dot)arthur(dot)mejia(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think that the behavior of this patch that silently ignores --exlcude-database "non-existent-db" is broken. What if someone has a large database "my-db-name", and they misspell it:
>>>
>>> $ vacuumdb --all --exclude-database "my-dbname"
>>>
>>> This will kick off a vacuum including the "my-db-name" they were trying to exclude.
>>>
>>> I think it would be better to generate an error and not do anything in this case.
>> +1
>>
>> Since exclude-schema validates and stops on error, I think it would
>> make sense to do the same for exclude-database. Current users are
>> used to this behavior so it's best to keep it consistent.
>>
>>>
>>> This also tracks with vacuumdb's existing behavior on --table/--schema which will tell you about a typo.

Mohamed,

If you'd like, I can assume authorship of this patch and post it to the
current CF.

Let me know...

-Ben Mejia