The real issue is my index growth and my requirement for weekly re-indexing (which blocks and therefore is more or less a manual process in a live production environment (fail over, changing vips etc).
BTW: Can't you simply recreate indexes online? Since postgresql accepts multiple indexes of same definition, this may look like: 1) create index concurrently index_alt 2) analyze index_alt 3) drop index_orig Both index_alt and index_orig having same definition