Re: System catalog bloat removing safety

On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 2:06 AM, Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 2013-09-17 23:12:24 -0700, Sergey Konoplev wrote:
>> How safe is it to use the technique described by the link below with
>> system catalog tables to remove bloat?
>> (in a couple of words it is about moving tuples to the beginning of
>> the table with a special way of updating)
>> http://www.depesz.com/2010/10/17/reduce-bloat-of-table-without-longexclusive-locks/
>
> At least for pg_index it's not safe, we use the xmin of rows when
> indcheckxmin = true.
> I am not aware of other cases, but I'd be hesitant to do so.

Thank you, Andres, I did not know this. Just wondering, why it was
made of type bool and not xid?

> You have bloat because of lots of temporary tables IIRC?

Actually I am developing a bloat removing tool based on the updating technique:

https://code.google.com/p/pgtoolkit/source/browse/trunk/README

Now the --system-catalog feature marked as experimental. About
pg_index - I think the solution is to exclude it from processing
strictly.

Anyone has other ideas of what system tables it might be affected
except pg_index?

--
Kind regards,
Sergey Konoplev
PostgreSQL Consultant and DBA

http://www.linkedin.com/in/grayhemp
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