[Proposal] Allow users to specify multiple tables in VACUUM commands

Hi Hackers,

Currently, VACUUM commands allow you to specify one table or all of the tables in the current database to vacuum. I’ve recently found myself wishing I could specify multiple tables in a single VACUUM statement. For example, this would be convenient when there are several large tables in a database and only a few need cleanup for XID purposes. Is this a feature that the community might be interested in?

I’ve attached my first attempt at introducing this functionality. In the patch, I’ve extended the table_name parameter in the VACUUM grammar to a qualified_name_list. While this fits into the grammar decently well, I suspect that it may be desirable to be able to specify a column list for each table as well (e.g. VACUUM foo (a), bar (b)). The attached patch requires that only one table be specified in order to specify a column list. But before I spend too much more time working on this, I thought I’d see how pgsql-hackers@ felt about this feature.

Thanks,
Nathan Bossart