Clustering system tables

[Julian Scarfe]

I've got a database (7.4) whose system tables have been long neglected.
Instead of the 100 or so pages I'd expect for 4000 rows after VACUUM, I've
got 24,000 pages and a mere 1.4 million unused item pointers.

If it were an ordinary table, I'd CLUSTER it, as from experience it would be
vastly quicker than a VACUUM FULL. But CLUSTER responds with:

ERROR: "pg_attribute" is a system catalog

Is VACUUM FULL my only option to compact the table?

Julian Scarfe

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[Alvaro Herrera]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2005 at 06:59:06PM +0100, Julian Scarfe wrote:
> I've got a database (7.4) whose system tables have been long neglected.
> Instead of the 100 or so pages I'd expect for 4000 rows after VACUUM, I've
> got 24,000 pages and a mere 1.4 million unused item pointers.
>
> If it were an ordinary table, I'd CLUSTER it, as from experience it would
> be vastly quicker than a VACUUM FULL. But CLUSTER responds with:
>
> ERROR: "pg_attribute" is a system catalog
>
> Is VACUUM FULL my only option to compact the table?

Yes. You can't cluster system tables. In theory we could do it (for
some of them) in standalone mode, but we don't support it ATM.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[@]dcc.uchile.cl>)
Management by consensus: I have decided; you concede.
(Leonard Liu)

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