Rebuild indexes

Hi Everyone,

I've a kind of less inserts/mostly updates table,
which we vacuum every half-hour.

here is the output of vacuum analyze

INFO:  --Relation public.accounts--
INFO:  Index accounts_u1: Pages 1498; Tuples 515:
Deleted 179.
    CPU 0.00s/0.00u sec elapsed 0.00 sec.
INFO:  Index accounts_u2: Pages 2227; Tuples 515:
Deleted 179.
    CPU 0.00s/0.00u sec elapsed 0.01 sec.
INFO:  Index accounts_u3: Pages 246; Tuples 515:
Deleted 179.
    CPU 0.00s/0.00u sec elapsed 0.00 sec.

however its indexes keeps growing on and on. After
surfing the manuals for a while, i came to know that
vacuum doesn't clears up dead tuples caused by
updates. so i then decided to do reindex online, but
that makes exclusive lock on table which would prevent

writing on to tables.

finally i'm at a point where i decided to do index
swapping.

for e.g.

1. create index accounts_u1_swap,accounts_u2_swap and
accounts_u3_swap in addition to the original indexes

2. analyze table to update stats, so that the table
knows about new indexes.

3. drop original indexes

4. i wish i had a rename index command to rename _swap
to its original index name. now create indexes with
original name

5. follow #2  and #3 (now drop _swap indexes)

Is there a better way to do this. comments are
appreciated.

thanks
-Shankar

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com