Re: new GUC var: autovacuum_process_all_tables

On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 19:23 -0500, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> Simon Riggs wrote:
> >> not trying to make sure that cron-driven
> >> scripts can do anything autovacuum can.
> >>
> >
> > I'm not in favour of limiting our capability to internal actions only.
> > If we add a capability for scheduling work, we can easily make it
> > capable of scheduling many kinds of work.
> >
> > Writing an application maintenance utility in PL/pgSQL is much better
> > than having to write it for all the different servers an application may
> > need to run on. We can't ignore that many people use Windows.
> >
> >
>
> I'm not sure what you're saying here. Windows has a scheduler (in my
> setup, that's how my buildfarm members run). And there are third party
> cron utilities as well.

All I'm saying is *if* we put scheduling inside Postgres for autovacuum
*then* we should make it general purpose scheduling.

If anybody uses the argument that "we have external schedulers, so don't
put them in the database" then that argument applies equally to
scheduling autovacuum. It's easy to turn autovacuum on/off via an
external scheduler, yet look upthread and see how many people think it
should be in the database.

Whichever way you think the decision should go, the same arguments apply
to scheduling autovacuum and scheduling other database maintenance
tasks.

--
Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support