PostgreSQL clustering VS MySQL clustering

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 12:13:00 +0900 (JST), Tatsuo Ishii
<t-ishii(at)sra(dot)co(dot)jp> wrote:
> IMO the bottle neck is not WAL but table/index bloat. Lots of updates
> on large tables will produce lots of dead tuples. Problem is, There'
> is no effective way to reuse these dead tuples since VACUUM on huge
> tables takes longer time. 8.0 adds new vacuum delay
> paramters. Unfortunately this does not help. It just make the
> execution time of VACUUM longer, that means more and more dead tuples
> are being made while updating.
>
> Probably VACUUM works well for small to medium size tables, but not
> for huge ones. I'm considering about to implement "on the spot
> salvaging dead tuples".

Quick thought -- would it be to possible to implement a 'partial VACUUM'
per analogiam to partial indexes?

It would be then posiible to do:
VACUUM footable WHERE footime < current_date - 60;
after a statement to DELETE all/some rows older than 60 days.

The VACUUM would check visibility of columns which are mentioned
in an index (in this case: footable_footime_index ;)).

Of course it is not a great solution, but could be great for doing
housecleaning after large update/delete in a known range.

...and should be relatively simple to implement, I guess
(maybe without 'ANALYZE' part).

Regards,
Dawid