Re: partial VACUUM FULL

On Mar 23, 2004, at 3:57 PM, Bill Moran wrote:

> Joseph Shraibman wrote:
>> If I cancel a VACUUM FULL, is the work that was done up until that
>> point thrown away?  I have a table that needs vacuuming but I can't
>> accept the downtime involved in vacuuming.
>
> Not sure about the "cancel vacuum full" question, but I had some other
> thoughts
> for you.
>
> Keep in mind that a plain vacuum can do a lot of good if done
> regularly, and
> it doesn't lock tables, thus the database can be in regular use while
> it's
> run.  As a result, there is no downtime involved with regularly
> scheduled
> vacuums.

Unfortunately, with some things, and I'm not sure why, as I don't
understand the VACUUM stuff that well, I had assumed that running
VACUUM ANALYZE nightly would be enough.  After I noticed that a
specific database (very transient data) had bloated to nearly 7Gb, I
ran VACUUM FULL on it, which took an hour or so, and it was reduced
down to under 1GB.

Is there a better way to deal with this?  This is on 7.3, and I wonder
if 7.4 fixed that, but it's been hard to schedule time to upgrade.

Chris
--
| Christopher Petrilli
| petrilli (at) amber.org