For various reasons, and in various cases, bloat happens. Theoretically autovacuum protects us all, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes someone disables it, or mis-configures, or bad planet alignment happens, and we end up in deep bloat. What to do then? Vacuum? ...

Some time ago Joshua Tolley described how to reduce bloat from tables without locking (well, some locks are there, but very short, and not really intrusive). Side note: Joshua: big thanks, great idea. Based on his idea and some our research, i ...

Some time ago Josh Berkus wrote about possible changes in VACUUM FULL. Now these changes came to life. By now, I mean 6th of January, when Takahiro Itagaki committed his patch: Log Message: ----------- Support rewritten-based full vacuum as VACUUM FULL. Traditional VACUUM FULL was ...

Yeah. This one patch alone is worth upgrading to 8.4. On 3rd of December Heikki Linnakangas committed his patch. Commit message: Introduce visibility map. The visibility map is a bitmap with one bit per heap page, where a set bit indicates that all ...

On 30th of September, Heikki Linnakangas committed his patch that changes FSM: Rewrite the FSM. Instead of relying on a fixed-size shared memory segment, the free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each relation (except for hash indexes; ...