Re: temporarily stop autovacuum

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Joshua D. Drake wrote:

>> It would be a significant hack but you could update pg_autovacuum to set
>> all relations to false.
>
> Which will no longer work in 8.4.
>
> More generally, it was pointed out to me that users apparently do  
> updates of pg_autovacuum to change settings on a bunch of tables at  
> once.  We might get some complaints if we remove that facility.

Hmm, argh.  Maybe we do need the rule on a fake pg_autovacuum that
Itagaki-san was proposing.

There's a problem however; for pg_autovacuum you used to need to insert
some -1 values on columns on which you wanted to keep as defaults.  On
the new code you need to skip the value altogether, and a -1 is rejected
with an error.  Not sure how would we translate that.