REPACK and naming

On Wednesday, September 17, 2025, Marcos Pegoraro <marcos(at)f10(dot)com(dot)br> wrote:

> Em ter., 16 de set. de 2025 às 23:01, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>
> escreveu:
>
>> I think RETABLE is not a proposal to be taken seriously. That's
>> extremely confusing.
>>
>
> This feature could be used in a future version to rearrange fields in a
> table, for better padding.
> I don't think we have another one available for this purpose.
>
> CREATE TABLE T(A text, B integer, C bigint, D integer);
>
> We could have something like
> RETABLE T USING(B, D, C, A)
>

That changes logical aspects of a table and so would be done as part of
alter table, IMO. “AT tbl Rearrange columns (names list) “

I’m not a fan of “retable” as a command keyword.

But this digresses from the topic at hand.

I’m fine with repack itself. Deprecating vacuum full would be nice - but
actually renaming existing things is bound to just make matters worse, IMO.

Concretely, maybe we should remove vacuum full from the vacuum command
page, and just call it out as compatibility spelling of repack on its
page. Maybe do the same for cluster (I haven’t dived into the new feature
enough to confidently describe all this yet though).

David J.