Re: truncating or full vacuuming

=?UTF-8?Q?Viktor_Bojovi=C4=87?= <viktor(dot)bojovic(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> while creating an index on billion records table i have canceled creation
> because index took me ~70GB of space.
> When I looked into disk space i saw that space is still occupied , and the
> index doesn't exist.

hmm ... was your version of "cancel" spelled "kill -9" or something like
that? If so it's unsurprising that temp files would have been left
behind. Look in the pgsql_tmp subdirectory. It's also possible that
the partially-filled index files are still there but aren't linked to
by any live pg_class row. Check for files that don't match any entry in
the pg_class.relfilenode column. In both cases you'd have to remove any
such files by hand --- VACUUM is not going to fix this for you.

regards, tom lane