Re: Optimizing away second VACUUM heap scan when only BRIN indexes on table

On 21 December 2015 at 02:14, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
wrote:

> Jim Nasby wrote:
> > On 11/23/15 5:06 PM, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> > >I realize that the second scan performed by lazy_vacuum_heap() only
> > >visits those pages known to contain dead tuples. However, the
> > >experience of seeing problems with the random sampling of ANALYZE
> > >makes me think that that might not be very helpful. There is no good
> > >reason to think that there won't be a uniform distribution of dead
> > >tuples across the heap, and so only visiting pages known to contain
> > >dead tuples might be surprisingly little help even when there are
> > >relatively few VACUUM-able tuples in the table.
> >
> > Even worse is if you can't fit all the dead TIDs in memory and have to do
> > multiple passes for no reason...
>
> Since BRIN indexes cannot be primary keys nor unique keys, it's hard to
> be convinced that the use case of a table with only BRIN indexes is
> terribly interesting.
>

Given BRIN's characteristics, such a table design is compelling when the
table is very large, yet possible only for certain use cases.

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