Re: autovacuum next steps, take 2

Tom Lane wrote:
> "Matthew T. O'Connor" <matthew@zeut.net> writes:
>> That does sounds simpler. Is chunk-at-a-time a realistic option for 8.3?
> 
> It seems fairly trivial to me to have a scheme where you do one
> fill-workmem-and-scan-indexes cycle per invocation, and store the
> next-heap-page-to-scan in some handy place (new pg_class column updated
> along with relpages/reltuples, likely).  Galy is off in left field with
> some far more complex ideas :-( but I don't see that there's all that
> much needed to support this behavior ... especially if we don't expose
> it to the SQL level but only support it for autovac's use.  Then we're
> not making any big commitment to support the behavior forever.

Well, if we can make it happen soon, it might be the best thing for 
autovacuum.