Re: First steps with 8.3 and autovacuum launcher

I wrote:
> Actually, if you wanted a low-hanging solution to that, it would
> probably be to revert this 8.2 patch:
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-committers/2006-09/msg00284.php

Uh ... never mind, that won't help at all.  Reducing the lock taken for
ANALYZE could allow CREATE INDEX (ShareLock) to run concurrently.  But
ALTER TABLE wants AccessExclusive lock, and no amount of fine-tuning of
the conflicting lock will help.

It might be possible to solve this if we reduce the strength of the lock
used for ALTER TABLE.  We'd have to go through all the commands
potentially issued by a pg_dump script and see if they could all be made
to run concurrently with autovac, which is a bit nervous-making but
might be feasible; and I'm afraid tablecmds.c would need some
restructuring to not use the same lock type for every variant of ALTER.
But it seems like a path worth investigating.
        regards, tom lane