Subject: Reclaiming disk space

From: [email-masked] (Paul Brunner)
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 94 11:37:52 EDT

POSTGRES does not appear to give one an efficient way to reclaim disk space
from deleted instances, without temporarily denying access to the database,
unloading data, destroying and recreating classes, and then reloading the
data. If a significant number of deletions occur, even with running the
vacuum command, the disk files for the classes will never shrink but only grow
in size as time goes by. It appears from the documentation and tests that
space for deleted instances becomes dead space in the files, never used again.

I am interested in hearing how users of POSTGRES deal with this issue. 
Is there an easier or less time consuming way to reclaim the disk space
from deleted instances?
How do users deal with the fact that without doing something like unloading/
reloading data destroying/recreating classes, files will only ever increase
in size?

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