Vacuum, Freeze and Analyze: the big picture

Folks,

There's currently some great ideas bouncing around about eliminating the
overhead associated with FREEZE. However, I wanted to take a step back
and take a look at the big picture for VACUUM, FREEZE and ANALYZE.
Otherwise, we're liable to repeat the 8.4 problem of making one
operation better (background vacuum) while making another one worse
(freezing).

The big, big picture is this:

90% of our users need to think about VACUUM/ANALYZE
at least 10% of the time
and 10% of our users need to think about it
almost 90% of the time.

That's considerably better than was the case 5 years ago, when vacuum
management was a daily or weekly responsibility for nearly 100% of our
users, but it's still not good enough. Our target should be that only
those with really unusual setups should have to *ever* think about
vacuum and analyze.

So I've set up a wiki page to document the various problems that force
users to think about vacuum and analyze and try to troubleshoot it:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/VacuumHeadaches

We can also collect suggested solutions here. I'm looking to create a
long-term development target which removes most of these vacuum
headaches over the next 3 or 4 releases, without making the unremoved
headaches siginficantly worse.

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