Re: Minimally avoiding Transaction Wraparound in VLDBs

On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Tom Lane wrote:

> BTW ... the original Berkeley papers on Postgres make frequent reference
> to a "vacuum daemon", which seems to be essentially what we're trying to
> build with autovacuum.  Does anyone know if the Berkeley implementation
> ever actually had auto vacuuming, or was that all handwaving?  If it did
> exist, why was it removed?

Well, I was just poking around the executor and noticed this in
ExecDelete():
   /*    * Note: Normally one would think that we have to delete index tuples    * associated with the heap tuple now..
  *    * ... but in POSTGRES, we have no need to do this because the vacuum    * daemon automatically opens an index
scanand deletes index tuples    * when it finds deleted heap tuples. -cim 9/27/89    */
 

So, it seems they must have actually written the vacuum daemon.

Gavin