On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 04:48:42PM -0500, Jeremy Haile wrote:
> > BTW, that's the default values for analyze... the defaults for vacuum
> > are 2x that.
>
> Yeah - I was actually more concerned that tables would need to be
> analyzed more often than I was about vacuuming too often, so I used
> analyze as the example. Since my app is inserting constantly throughout
> the day and querying for "recent" data - I want to make sure the query
> planner realizes that there are lots of rows with new timestamps on
> them. In other words, if I run a query "select * from mytable where
> timestamp > '9:00am'" - I want to make sure it hasn't been a day since
> the table was analyzed, so the planner thinks there are zero rows
> greater than 9:00am today.
Well, analyze is pretty cheap. At most it'll read only 30,000 pages,
which shouldn't take terribly long on a decent system. So you can be a
lot more aggressive with it.
> > What's more important
> > is to make sure critical tables (such as queue tables) are getting
> > vacuumed frequently so that they stay small.
>
> Is the best way to do that usually to lower the scale factors? Is it
> ever a good approach to lower the scale factor to zero and just set the
> thresholds to a pure number of rows? (when setting it for a specific
> table)
The problem is what happens if autovac goes off and starts vacuuming
some large table? While that's going on your queue table is sitting
there bloating. If you have a separate cronjob to handle the queue
table, it'll stay small, especially in 8.2.
--
Jim Nasby jim@nasby.net
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)