Re: New VACUUM FULL

Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> wrote:

> Our perception of acceptable change is much higher than most users. If
> we tell people "use VACUUM FULL" or vacuumdb -f, then that command
> should, if possible, continue to work well across many releases.
> vacuumdb in most people's minds is the command you run to ease
> maintenance and make everything right, rather than a specific set of
> features.
>
> We have "It just works" as a principle. I think the corollary of that is
> that we should also have "It just continues to work the same way".

I used "VACUUM FULL" because we were discussing to drop VFI completely,
but I won't replace the behavior if hot-standby can support VFI.
We can use any keywords without making it reserved in "VACUUM (...)" syntax.
VACUUM (REWRITE), the first idea, can be used here. We can also take on
entirely-different syntax for it -- ex, "ALTER TABLE REWRITE or SHRINK".

I think the ALTER TABLE idea is not so bad because it does _not_ support
database-wide maintenance. REWRITE is not the best maintenance in normal
cases because a database should contain some rarely-updated tables.

Regards,
---
Takahiro Itagaki
NTT Open Source Software Center