Re: vacuum full questions

Kevin Kempter <kevink@consistentstate.com> wrote:

> 1) is there any way to gain some visibility per the progress of the
> vacuum full

None that I know of, short of attaching to the backend process with a
debugger and poking at its guts.

> 2) can I safely kill the vacuum full and do a dump, drop table,
> restore instead?

Killing a VACUUM FULL can leave the table or its indexes more bloated
than when you started, but it should have no other negative impact.  I
have generally had to kill my attempts to VACUUM FULL and resort to
other techniques to deal with extreme bloat.  If you have room for an
extra copy of the table on disk, CLUSTER is usually a fast, easy way
to rewrite the table without bloat.

-Kevin