Re: Best Approach for Swapping a Table with its Copy

On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 1:33 PM Adrian Klaver <adrian(dot)klaver(at)aklaver(dot)com> wrote:
> Not seeing it:
>
> https://reorg.github.io/pg_repack/
>
> "Details
> Full Table Repacks
>
> [...]
>
> pg_repack will only hold an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock for a short period
> during initial setup (steps 1 and 2 above) and during the final
> swap-and-drop phase (steps 6 and 7). For the rest of its time, pg_repack
> only needs to hold an ACCESS SHARE lock on the original table, meaning
> INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs may proceed as usual."
>
> During the ACCESS EXCLUSIVE stages you will not have access.

The operations under ACCESS EXCLUSIVE are short-lived. In my benchmarks, the
"repack_swap" function finishes within the order of magnitude of milliseconds.
The operations seem to be catalogue-only. I'd love someone to confirm this
though, because I am not a specialist in C and Postgres extensions.

Here is the code if you want to have a look:

https://github.com/reorg/pg_repack/blob/306b0d4f7f86e807498ac00baec89ecd33411398/lib/repack.c#L843

What I am after is the same, but I seek a deeper understanding of what it does,
and why it does it. For example, it swaps relfilenode. Why?

> Not only that with pg_repack you are not changing the table definition,
> whereas in your case you are introducing a new constraint and associated
> index.

Correct, but I am not using pg_repack. I have cloned the table using my own
tool. I'm citing pg_repack because it does perform a table swap (a bloated table
is swapped by a new non-bloated table).

Given that I know pg_repack works well in large databases, it has to follow
that the approach they have to swapping the tables is robust.

> Do you have a dev setup where you can test alternatives with a test
> sample of data?

Do you mean alternatives to table-cloning-and-swapping?

Regards,
- Marcelo