Re: why vacuum

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 15:14, Tom Lane wrote: > Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon@thenilgiris.com> writes: > > (A MySQueeeel guy
said,not Kenneth)... > > 'I wouldnt commit mission critical data to a database that needs to be  > > vacuumed once a
week'.
My two-penneth worth...<flamage>
I wouldn't commit mission critical data to a database (or DBA) that doesn't
have a concept of vacuuming (or desire to do it regularly).  But, less
flamingly, I wouldn't commit mission-critical data to something that lacked
the ability to have proper constraints, triggers and server-side procedures
to ensure the data actually remains sensible.  Note that Sybase/MS-SQL's
check constraint model asserts the constraint BEFORE the trigger, which
discourages you from attempting to check and handle meaning of data!</flamage>
 > This guy is not worth arguing with.
D'Accord!
 > > So why does pg need vacuum?
For (inter alia) the same reason that
* Oracle has an ANALYZE_SCHEMA and DBMS_SPACE_ADMIN
and (hoist by his own petard)
* MySQueeeeaL has myisamchk --stats_method=method_name --analyze

<flamage>Oh, well: MySQL bigot and internal consistency? whadya expect?</flamage>
Dave Bath
(Oracle DBA for health/telcos way back in 1986: honeywrong GCOS and Pr1mos)
-- 
David T. Bath
dave.bath@unix.net