Re: big database with very small dump !?

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Joao Ferreira gmail
<joao.miguel.c.ferreira@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
>        I'm finding it very strange that my pg takes 9Giga on disk but
>        pg_dumpall produces a 250Mega dump. 'VACUUM FULL' was executed
>        yesterday.
>
>        Is this normal ? Should I be worried ?

It really depends.  If you've got a lot of indexes then maybe that's
normal.  But most the time you don't see more than about 4 times the
space used in the db as in the dump.

It's likely you've got index bloat.  If you reload a pg_dump of the
database in question into another server how much space does that take
up?  Look into using CLUSTER or REINDEX to fix the space usage.