Re: REINDEX during a transaction

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 10:23:41AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Ashley Moran <ashley.moran@codeweavers.net> writes:
> > BEGIN WORK;
> > DELETE FROM X; COPY X ...; REINDEX TABLE X;
> > DELETE FROM Y; COPY Y ...; REINDEX TABLE Y;
> > DELETE FROM Z; COPY Z ...; REINDEX TABLE Z;
> > COMMIT;
>
> Why don't you use TRUNCATE?  Why do you think you need REINDEX at all?
>
> If you do need it, you'd be best off to drop the indexes, truncate,
> copy, re-create the indexes.  See
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/populate.html#POPULATE-RM-INDEXES

And to answer some of your original question, I don't believe there's
any advantage to wrapping the REINDEXes into the transaction. If can't
use Tom's suggestion of dropping the indexes before the COPY, you might
want to instead create new indexes with the same definition of existing
ones, and then drop the old ones; readers of the table will react
differently to the two.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461