Vacuum full considered useful ;)

Hi,
Something I'd like to share.

I switched to postgres about 4 months ago.
The perfomance after a while got worse.
I posted a message here, where the result was that my IO was the
problem.

I run vacuum every night. I never used vacuum full because it is not
explicitly recommended and I read somewhere in the archives a mail that
the consistency of the db suffered after a vacuum full run.

Yesterday I switched from 8.1 to 8.2. So I needed to dump the dbase
and reimport it. The dbase after 4 months of running without "vacuum
full"
reached 60 gigabyte of diskspace. Now after a fresh import it only
has 5 gigabyte!

No wonder, I got IO problems with such a fragmentation.

For people not very familiar with postgres especially those coming
from mysql,
i'd recommend paying attention to this.

regards,
patric de waha