Re: Vacuum template databases, Urgent: Production problem

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 11:44:12AM -0500, Pallav Kalva wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Do we have to vacuum template0 database regularly ? We got this warning
> this morning while vacuuming databases. As a part of my daily vacuum job
> I do vacuum of quartz, helix_fdc and affiliate databases which are the
> one's which are heavily updated and used. But today I realized that usps,
> template1 and template0 is also being used in a transaction somehow based
> on this (SELECT datname, age(datfrozenxid) FROM pg_database;) query.
> Actually we dont do any updates on usps , template1 and templat0 databases
> but some how still the age(datfrozenxid keeps incrementing.
> My question now is do I have to vacuum daily template1 and template0
> databse, is there any harm on vacuuming these databases daily ?, since
> these are postgres system tables I am kind of worried. I was told that
> template0 is freezed but not sure why the age(datfrozenxid keeps
> incrementing. I am going to vacuum usps from now anyway. We are using
> Postgres version 8.0.2

You should upgrade to 8.0.6; data loss bugs have been fixed in there.

If you never update USPS you can do a vacuum freeze on it and you won't
need to worry about XID rollover. Same with template1. But if they're
small databases it's probably safer just to periodically vacuum (once a
month or so).

If you up to 8.1 and enable autovacuum, it should take care of all of
this for you.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com
Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461