Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> The elephant in the room here is that if the relation is a million
> pages of which 1-100,000 and 1,000,000 are in use, no amount of bias
> is going to help us truncate the relation unless every tuple on page
> 1,000,000 gets updated or deleted.
Well, there is no way to move a tuple across pages in a user-invisible,
non-blocking fashion, so our ability to do something automatic about the
above scenario is limited. The discussion at the moment is about ways
of reducing the probability of getting into that situation in the first
place. That doesn't preclude also providing some more-invasive tools
that people can use when they do get into that situation; but let's
not let I-want-a-magic-pony syndrome prevent us from doing anything
at all.
regards, tom lane