Re: Attempting to delete excess rows from table with BATCH DELETE

On Wed, Jan 28, 2026 at 10:39 AM Greg Sabino Mullane <htamfids(at)gmail(dot)com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 27, 2026 at 10:31 PM David G. Johnston <
> david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> Strongly encourage you to try to accomplish your goal without any delete
>> commands at that scale that causes vacuuming. Can you just create an empty
>> copy and load the data to keep into it then point at the newly filled
>> database? Truncate is OK.
>>
>
> This is really the best solution, especially if most of the rows are > 75
> days old. This removes 100% of your bloat, allows you to keep the old data
> around in case something goes wrong, reduces WAL compared to massive
> deletes, and removes the need to mess with autovacuum.
>

Looping DELETE is the Dirt Simple option when the application is writing
24x7, when there's a lot of FK dependencies, etc. It also allows you to
throttle the process (bash sleep between DELETE statements, or only purging
a few old days per script execution and then only run the script at night).

--
Death to <Redacted>, and butter sauce.
Don't boil me, I'm still alive.
<Redacted> lobster!