Disabling Heap-Only Tuples

Hi,

Heap-Only Tuple (HOT) updates are a significant performance
enhancement, as they prevent unnecessary page writes. However, HOT
comes with a caveat: it means that if we have lots of available space
earlier on in the relation, it can only be used for new tuples or in
cases where there's insufficient space on a page for an UPDATE to use
HOT.

This mechanism limits our options for condensing tables, forcing us to
resort to methods like running VACUUM FULL/CLUSTER or using external
tools like pg_repack. These either require exclusive locks (which will
be a deal-breaker on large tables on a production system), or there's
risks involved. Of course we can always flood pages with new versions
of a row until it's forced onto an early page, but that shouldn't be
necessary.

Considering these trade-offs, I'd like to propose an option to allow
superusers to disable HOT on tables. The intent is to trade some
performance benefits for the ability to reduce the size of a table
without the typical locking associated with it.

This feature could be used to shrink tables in one of two ways:
temporarily disabling HOT until DML operations have compacted the data
into a smaller area, or performing a mass update on later rows to
relocate them to an earlier location, probably in stages. Of course,
this would need to be used in conjunction with a VACUUM operation.

Admittedly this isn't ideal, and it would be better if we had an
operation that could do this (e.g. VACUUM COMPACT <table_name>), or an
option that causes some operations to avoid HOT when it detects an
amount of free space over a threshold, but in lieu of those, I thought
this would at least allow users to help themselves when running into
disk space issues.

Thoughts?

Thom