Re: Bloated Table

On Wed, 27 May 2009, Tom Lane wrote:

> It's an interesting exercise in trying to estimate bloat without
> groveling through the whole relation

Interesting and an extremely common request.  I just added an item to the
Vacuum section of the TODO list while you were listing issues and
potential solutions here:  "Provide more information in order to improve
user-side estimates of dead space bloat in relations" links to this
thread.

As pointed out upthread, there's a fair number of people who have picked
up on this particular query for bloat estimation.  It seemed accurate
enough for gross maintenance use when I did a quick check of its results
before, but those were tables without variable widths, TOAST, etc.  This
is one of those boring tasks that DBAs really want more
monitoring-friendly visibility into.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD