Re: Feedback on getting rid of VACUUM FULL

Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

> Hmm, AFAICT pg_reorg is much more complex, writing stuff to a temp table
> and swapping relfilenodes afterwards. More like the VACUUM REWRITE
> that's been discussed.
> 
> For the kicks, I looked at what it would take to write a utility like
> that. It turns out to be quite trivial, patch attached. It uses the same
> principle as VACUUM FULL, scans from the end, moving tuples to
> lower-numbered pages until it can't do it anymore. It requires a small
> change to heap_update(), to override the preference to store the new
> tuple on the same page as the old one, but other than that, it's all in
> the external module.

More than five years have passed since Heikki posted this, and we still
haven't found a solution to the problem -- which neverthless keeps
biting people to the point that multiple "user-space" implementations of
similar techniques are out there.

I think what we need here is something that does heap_update to tuples
at the end of the table, moving them to earlier pages; then wait for old
snapshots to die (the infrastructure for which we have now, thanks to
CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY); then truncate the empty pages.  Of course,
there are lots of details to resolve.  It doesn't really matter that
this runs for long: a process doing this for hours might be better than
AccessExclusiveLock on the table for a much shorter period.

Are there any takers?

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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