Re: limiting hint bit I/O

On 1/14/11 11:51 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> The people whose tables are mostly insert-only complain about it, but
> that's not the majority of our userbase IMO. We just happen to have a
> couple of particularly vocal ones, like Berkus.

It might or might not be the majority, but it's an extremely common case
affecting a lot of users. Many, if not most, software applications have
a "log" table (or two, or three) which just accumulates rows, and when
that log table gets a vacuum freeze it pretty much halts the database in
its tracks. Between my client practice and IRC, I run across complaints
about this issue around 3 times a month.

And data warehousing is a significant portion of our user base, and
*all* DW users are affected by this. In some cases, vacuum issues are
sufficient to prevent people from using PostgreSQL for data warehousing.

I'd dare say that there are more users who would like autovacuum to
handle big tables better than want synchronous replication, for example.

--
-- Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com