Optimizing storage and managing cleanup
Transactions are an integral part of the PostgreSQL system. However, transactions come with a small price tag attached. As already shown in this chapter, it can happen that concurrent users will be presented with different data. Not everybody will get the same data returned by a query. In addition to that, DELETE
and UPDATE
are not allowed to actually overwrite data as ROLLBACK
would not work. If you happen to be in the middle of a large DELETE
operation, you cannot be sure whether you will be able to COMMIT
or not. In addition to that, data is still visible while you do a DELETE
, and sometimes data is even visible once your modification has long since finished.
Consequently, this means that cleanup has to happen asynchronously. A transaction can not clean up its own mess and COMMIT
/ROLLBACK
might be too early to take care of dead rows.
The solution to the problem is VACUUM
:
test=# h VACUUM Command: VACUUM Description: garbage-collect and optionally...