VACUUM, 24/7 availability and 7.2

I'm doing some work for a smallish company which conducts
its business largely online. Currently they have a legacy
mishmash of Oracle and MySQL databases which they wish
to unify one one platform (RDBMS with client access via
browser and custom serverside applications for employees
and customers).

PostgreSQL would be my primary candidate. However the company's
operating requirments mean that the data needed for interaction
with customers / website users must be available on a 24/7 basis.
This is primarily a) data related to product ordering and
tables for storing order data; and b) website user authentication
and personalisation data (logins, user preferences etc).

It is therefore not an option to have these databases offline
at regular intervals for any significant length of time for
VACUUMing. Replicating data to say MySQL databases is
technically feasible, at least in the case of b) above, but
not desirable. Are there any existing "native" PostgreSQL solutions
to this problem?

More importantly, what is the situation on VACUUM for release 7.2?
It seems from the pgsql-hackers list that there are plans for
a none-exclusively locking VACUUM, e.g.:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=vacuum&hl=en&group=comp.databases.postgresql.hackers&rnum=1&selm=12833.990140724%40sss.pgh.pa.us

(sorry about the long URL); how far advanced are they, and is
there any kind of release schedule for 7.2?

Any answers (or pointers thereto, haven't found any myself :-()
much appreciated

Ian Barwick

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