Re: Disabling Heap-Only Tuples

On Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 11:50 AM Matthias van de Meent
<boekewurm+postgres@gmail.com> wrote:
> Agreed on all points. But isn't that true for most most tools on bloat
> prevention and/or detection? E.g. fillfactor, autovacuum_*, ...

Not nearly to the same extent, IMHO. A lot of those parameters can be
left alone forever and you lose nothing. That's not so here.

> I'd prefer that too, but by lack of other work in this area this seems
> like it fills a niche that would otherwise require extremely expensive
> locking over a long time for CLUSTER, superuser+pg_repack, or manual
> scripts that update tuples until they're located on a different page
> (begin; update tuple WHERE ctid > '(12,0)' returning ctid; ...;
> commit;). I agree this is very minimal and can definitely be used as a
> footgun, but with the description that it can be a footgun I don't
> think it's (much) worse than the current situation - a user should
> only reach for this once they've realized they actually have an issue.

Well, I sort of expected that counter-argument, but I'm not sure that I buy it.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com