Interface for pg_autovacuum

I'm teaching a class this week and a student asked me about OIDs. He
related the story of how in Sybase, if you moved a database from one
server from another, permissions got all screwed up because user IDs
no longer matched. I explained that exposing something like an
integer ID in a user interface or an API is just a bad idea and
PostgreSQL doesn't do that.

Then I got to pg_autovacuum....

So... is there any reason there isn't a prescribed interface to
pg_autovacuum that doesn't expose vacrelid? Can we get that added to
TODO?

Also, in the meantime, it would make things a lot easier if the
fields in pg_autovacuum had appropriate defaults... vacrelid should
stay as-is with no default, enabled should default to true, and the
remaining fields should default to -1 so they use the system settings.

Also, I don't see a TODO about dumping pg_autovacuum; it seems that
should be added. Of course, we wouldn't want to just dump the table
itself since vacrelid would become invalid, but once there is a means
to alter vacuum settings for a table by name presumably it should be
relatively easy to add a section to pg_dump that outputs the
appropriate code to change the settings in pg_autovacuum.
--
Jim Nasby jim(dot)nasby(at)enterprisedb(dot)com
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)