Re: remove flatfiles.c

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Tom Lane<tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> So I have a script that goes and finds bloated tables and runs VACUUM
>> FULL on them in the middle of the night if the bloat passes a certain
>> threshold.  The tables are small enough and the number of users is low
>> enough that this doesn't cause any problems for me.  I'm OK if the
>> name of the command changes, but I'd like there to be a command that I
>> can pass a table name to and get my table debloated without having to
>> make any follow-on decisions (such as picking an index to cluster by).
>
> I think we *should* have a command that works like CLUSTER except it just
> seqscans the source table without depending on any particular index.
> Whether it's called VACUUM FULL or something else is a detail.

Yeah. We could do this by extending the syntax for cluster (e.g.
CLUSTER [VERBOSE] tablename [USING indexname | WITH NO INDEX]), but
I'm not sure whether that has any real advantage over just using the
existing command name.

I confess to being a little fuzzy on the details of how this
implementation (seq-scanning the source table for live tuples) is
different/better from the current VACUUM FULL implementation. Can
someone fill me in?

...Robert