Alvaro,
First off, with over 200 GUC variables currently active, in general we
should be looking to *eliminate* variables rather than adding them. So
my personal bar for endorsing a new GUC is set pretty high.
> Now, sometimes it might make more sense to keep it enabled but have it
> only check for certain tables, and leave the majority of them disabled.
> For this we'd have a separate GUC parameter, as in $SUBJECT (I'm not
> wedded to the name), and have the user set autovacuum_enabled=true via
> reloptions to enable it.
I can't imagine, nor have I encountered in the 3 years of consulting I
did since Autovaccum became available, such a use case.
Unless there's a real, critical use case for this which is common, I'm
opposed to this GUC.
On the other hand, I'd been keen on a runtime suset autovaccum=on/off
which we could call from a cron job or the pgadmin scheduler in order to
have maintenance windows. Unless that's already becoming possible?
--Josh