Re: Help me recovering data

Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> How are so many people doing so many transactions so soon after installing?

> To hit wraparound you have to do a billion transactions? ("With a `B'") That
> takes real work. If you did 1,000 txn/minute for every minute of every day it
> would still take a couple years to get there.

> And most databases get a mix of updates and selects. I would expect it would
> be pretty hard to go that long with any significant level of update activity
> and no vacuums and not notice the performance problems from the dead tuples.

I think the people who've managed to shoot themselves in the foot this
way are those who decided to "optimize" their cron jobs to only vacuum
their user tables, and forgot about the system catalogs. So it's
probably more of a case of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"
than never having heard of VACUUM at all. I too don't see that you
could possibly get to 2 billion transactions without having found out
that Postgres requires regular VACUUMing.

regards, tom lane