Feedback-ID: ia2694551:Fastmail
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2024 11:31:17 +0100
From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
To: Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>
Cc: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>,
	PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: why there is not VACUUM FULL CONCURRENTLY?
Message-ID: <202401301031.7viyzjhkmal4@alvherre.pgsql>
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On 2024-Jan-30, Pavel Stehule wrote:

> One of my customer today is reducing one table from 140GB to 20GB.  Now he
> is able to run archiving. He should play with pg_repack, and it is working
> well today, but I ask myself, what pg_repack does not be hard to do
> internally because it should be done for REINDEX CONCURRENTLY. This is not
> a common task, and not will be, but on the other hand, it can be nice to
> have feature, and maybe not too hard to implement today. But I didn't try it

FWIW a newer, more modern and more trustworthy alternative to pg_repack
is pg_squeeze, which I discovered almost by random chance, and soon
discovered I liked it much more.

So thinking about your question, I think it might be possible to
integrate a tool that works like pg_squeeze, such that it runs when
VACUUM is invoked -- either under some new option, or just replace the
code under FULL, not sure.  If the Cybertec people allows it, we could
just grab the pg_squeeze code and add it to the things that VACUUM can
run.

Now, pg_squeeze has some additional features, such as periodic
"squeezing" of tables.  In a first attempt, for simplicity, I would
leave that stuff out and just allow it to run from the user invoking it,
and then have the command to do a single run.  (The scheduling features
could be added later, or somehow integrated into autovacuum, or maybe
something else.)

-- 
Álvaro Herrera         PostgreSQL Developer  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"We're here to devour each other alive"            (Hobbes)