Re: VACUUM and ANALYZE disagreeing on what reltuples means

On 7/25/17 12:55 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Tomas Vondra <tomas(dot)vondra(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
>> It seems to me that VACUUM and ANALYZE somewhat disagree on what
>> exactly reltuples means. VACUUM seems to be thinking that reltuples
>> = live + dead while ANALYZE apparently believes that reltuples =
>> live
>
>> The question is - which of the reltuples definitions is the right
>> one? I've always assumed that "reltuples = live + dead" but perhaps
>> not?
>
> I think the planner basically assumes that reltuples is the live
> tuple count, so maybe we'd better change VACUUM to get in step.
>

Attached is a patch that (I think) does just that. The disagreement was
caused by VACUUM treating recently dead tuples as live, while ANALYZE
treats both of those as dead.

At first I was worried that this will negatively affect plans in the
long-running transaction, as it will get underestimates (due to
reltuples not including rows it can see). But that's a problem we
already have anyway, you just need to run ANALYZE in the other session.

regards

--
Tomas Vondra http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
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