Re: VACUUM, 24/7 availability and 7.2

On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Ian Barwick wrote:

> 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

There is a faster, non-exclusive-locking VACUUM in the CVS now; this
should become part of 7.2. You can download the nightly snapsot and build
it to test it with your application.

HTH.