PostgreSQL 8.0.3 Documentation
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# Chapter 21. Routine Database Maintenance Tasks

There are a few routine maintenance chores that must be performed on a regular basis to keep a PostgreSQL server running smoothly. The tasks discussed here are repetitive in nature and can easily be automated using standard Unix tools such as cron scripts. But it is the database administrator's responsibility to set up appropriate scripts, and to check that they execute successfully.

One obvious maintenance task is creation of backup copies of the data on a regular schedule. Without a recent backup, you have no chance of recovery after a catastrophe (disk failure, fire, mistakenly dropping a critical table, etc.). The backup and recovery mechanisms available in PostgreSQL are discussed at length in Chapter 22.

The other main category of maintenance task is periodic "vacuuming" of the database. This activity is discussed in Section 21.1.

Something else that might need periodic attention is log file management. This is discussed in Section 21.3.

PostgreSQL is low-maintenance compared to some other database management systems. Nonetheless, appropriate attention to these tasks will go far towards ensuring a pleasant and productive experience with the system.

# 21.1. Routine Vacuuming

PostgreSQL's `VACUUM` command must be run on a regular basis for several reasons:

1. To recover disk space occupied by updated or deleted rows.

2. To update data statistics used by the PostgreSQL query planner.

3. To protect against loss of very old data due to transaction ID wraparound.

The frequency and scope of the `VACUUM` operations performed for each of these reasons will vary depending on the needs of each site. Therefore, database administrators must understand these issues and develop an appropriate maintenance strategy. This section concentrates on explaining the high-level issues; for details about command syntax and so on, see the VACUUM reference page.

Beginning in PostgreSQL 7.2, the standard form of `VACUUM` can run in parallel with normal database operations (selects, inserts, updates, deletes, but not changes to table definitions). Routine vacuuming is therefore not nearly as intrusive as it was in prior releases, and it is not as critical to try to schedule it at low-usage times of day.

Beginning in PostgreSQL 8.0, there are configuration parameters that can be adjusted to further reduce the performance impact of background vacuuming. See Section 16.4.3.4.

## 21.1.1. Recovering disk space

In normal PostgreSQL operation, an `UPDATE` or `DELETE` of a row does not immediately remove the old version of the row. This approach is necessary to gain the benefits of multiversion concurrency control (see Chapter 12): the row version must not be deleted while it is still potentially visible to other transactions. But eventually, an outdated or deleted row version is no longer of interest to any transaction. The space it occupies must be reclaimed for reuse by new rows, to avoid infinite growth of disk space requirements. This is done by running `VACUUM`.

Clearly, a table that receives frequent updates or deletes will need to be vacuumed more often than tables that are seldom updated. It may be useful to set up periodic cron tasks that `VACUUM` only selected tables, skipping tables that are known not to change often. This is only likely to be helpful if you have both large heavily-updated tables and large seldom-updated tables — the extra cost of vacuuming a small table isn't enough to be worth worrying about.

There are two variants of the `VACUUM` command. The first form, known as "lazy vacuum" or just `VACUUM`, marks expired data in tables and indexes for future reuse; it does not attempt to reclaim the space used by this expired data immediately. Therefore, the table file is not shortened, and any unused space in the file is not returned to the operating system. This variant of `VACUUM` can be run concurrently with normal database operations.

The second form is the `VACUUM FULL` command. This uses a more aggressive algorithm for reclaiming the space consumed by expired row versions. Any space that is freed by `VACUUM FULL` is immediately returned to the operating system. Unfortunately, this variant of the `VACUUM` command acquires an exclusive lock on each table while `VACUUM FULL` is processing it. Therefore, frequently using `VACUUM FULL` can have an extremely negative effect on the performance of concurrent database queries.

The standard form of `VACUUM` is best used with the goal of maintaining a fairly level steady-state usage of disk space. If you need to return disk space to the operating system you can use `VACUUM FULL` — but what's the point of releasing disk space that will only have to be allocated again soon? Moderately frequent standard `VACUUM` runs are a better approach than infrequent `VACUUM FULL` runs for maintaining heavily-updated tables.

Recommended practice for most sites is to schedule a database-wide `VACUUM` once a day at a low-usage time of day, supplemented by more frequent vacuuming of heavily-updated tables if necessary. (Some installations with an extremely high rate of data modification `VACUUM` busy tables as often as once every few minutes.) If you have multiple databases in a cluster, don't forget to `VACUUM` each one; the program `vacuumdb` may be helpful.

> Tip: The `contrib/pg_autovacuum` program can be useful for automating high-frequency vacuuming operations.

`VACUUM FULL` is recommended for cases where you know you have deleted the majority of rows in a table, so that the steady-state size of the table can be shrunk substantially with `VACUUM FULL`'s more aggressive approach. Use plain `VACUUM`, not `VACUUM FULL`, for routine vacuuming for space recovery.

If you have a table whose contents are deleted on a periodic basis, consider doing it with `TRUNCATE` rather than using `DELETE` followed by `VACUUM`. `TRUNCATE` removes the entire content of the table immediately, without requiring a subsequent `VACUUM` or `VACUUM FULL` to reclaim the now-unused disk space.

## 21.1.2. Updating planner statistics

The PostgreSQL query planner relies on statistical information about the contents of tables in order to generate good plans for queries. These statistics are gathered by the `ANALYZE` command, which can be invoked by itself or as an optional step in `VACUUM`. It is important to have reasonably accurate statistics, otherwise poor choices of plans may degrade database performance.

As with vacuuming for space recovery, frequent updates of statistics are more useful for heavily-updated tables than for seldom-updated ones. But even for a heavily-updated table, there may be no need for statistics updates if the statistical distribution of the data is not changing much. A simple rule of thumb is to think about how much the minimum and maximum values of the columns in the table change. For example, a `timestamp` column that contains the time of row update will have a constantly-increasing maximum value as rows are added and updated; such a column will probably need more frequent statistics updates than, say, a column containing URLs for pages accessed on a website. The URL column may receive changes just as often, but the statistical distribution of its values probably changes relatively slowly.

It is possible to run `ANALYZE` on specific tables and even just specific columns of a table, so the flexibility exists to update some statistics more frequently than others if your application requires it. In practice, however, the usefulness of this feature is doubtful. Beginning in PostgreSQL 7.2, `ANALYZE` is a fairly fast operation even on large tables, because it uses a statistical random sampling of the rows of a table rather than reading every single row. So it's probably much simpler to just run it over the whole database every so often.

> Tip: Although per-column tweaking of `ANALYZE` frequency may not be very productive, you may well find it worthwhile to do per-column adjustment of the level of detail of the statistics collected by `ANALYZE`. Columns that are heavily used in `WHERE` clauses and have highly irregular data distributions may require a finer-grain data histogram than other columns. See `ALTER TABLE SET STATISTICS`.

Recommended practice for most sites is to schedule a database-wide `ANALYZE` once a day at a low-usage time of day; this can usefully be combined with a nightly `VACUUM`. However, sites with relatively slowly changing table statistics may find that this is overkill, and that less-frequent `ANALYZE` runs are sufficient.

## 21.1.3. Preventing transaction ID wraparound failures

PostgreSQL's MVCC transaction semantics depend on being able to compare transaction ID (XID) numbers: a row version with an insertion XID greater than the current transaction's XID is "in the future" and should not be visible to the current transaction. But since transaction IDs have limited size (32 bits at this writing) a cluster that runs for a long time (more than 4 billion transactions) will suffer transaction ID wraparound: the XID counter wraps around to zero, and all of a sudden transactions that were in the past appear to be in the future — which means their outputs become invisible. In short, catastrophic data loss. (Actually the data is still there, but that's cold comfort if you can't get at it.)

Prior to PostgreSQL 7.2, the only defense against XID wraparound was to re-`initdb` at least every 4 billion transactions. This of course was not very satisfactory for high-traffic sites, so a better solution has been devised. The new approach allows a server to remain up indefinitely, without `initdb` or any sort of restart. The price is this maintenance requirement: every table in the database must be vacuumed at least once every billion transactions.

In practice this isn't an onerous requirement, but since the consequences of failing to meet it can be complete data loss (not just wasted disk space or slow performance), some special provisions have been made to help database administrators keep track of the time since the last `VACUUM`. The remainder of this section gives the details.

The new approach to XID comparison distinguishes two special XIDs, numbers 1 and 2 (`BootstrapXID` and `FrozenXID`). These two XIDs are always considered older than every normal XID. Normal XIDs (those greater than 2) are compared using modulo-231 arithmetic. This means that for every normal XID, there are two billion XIDs that are "older" and two billion that are "newer"; another way to say it is that the normal XID space is circular with no endpoint. Therefore, once a row version has been created with a particular normal XID, the row version will appear to be "in the past" for the next two billion transactions, no matter which normal XID we are talking about. If the row version still exists after more than two billion transactions, it will suddenly appear to be in the future. To prevent data loss, old row versions must be reassigned the XID `FrozenXID` sometime before they reach the two-billion-transactions-old mark. Once they are assigned this special XID, they will appear to be "in the past" to all normal transactions regardless of wraparound issues, and so such row versions will be good until deleted, no matter how long that is. This reassignment of XID is handled by `VACUUM`.

`VACUUM`'s normal policy is to reassign `FrozenXID` to any row version with a normal XID more than one billion transactions in the past. This policy preserves the original insertion XID until it is not likely to be of interest anymore. (In fact, most row versions will probably live and die without ever being "frozen".) With this policy, the maximum safe interval between `VACUUM` runs on any table is exactly one billion transactions: if you wait longer, it's possible that a row version that was not quite old enough to be reassigned last time is now more than two billion transactions old and has wrapped around into the future — i.e., is lost to you. (Of course, it'll reappear after another two billion transactions, but that's no help.)

Since periodic `VACUUM` runs are needed anyway for the reasons described earlier, it's unlikely that any table would not be vacuumed for as long as a billion transactions. But to help administrators ensure this constraint is met, `VACUUM` stores transaction ID statistics in the system table `pg_database`. In particular, the `datfrozenxid` column of a database's `pg_database` row is updated at the completion of any database-wide `VACUUM` operation (i.e., `VACUUM` that does not name a specific table). The value stored in this field is the freeze cutoff XID that was used by that `VACUUM` command. All normal XIDs older than this cutoff XID are guaranteed to have been replaced by `FrozenXID` within that database. A convenient way to examine this information is to execute the query

    SELECT datname, age(datfrozenxid) FROM pg_database;

The `age` column measures the number of transactions from the cutoff XID to the current transaction's XID.

With the standard freezing policy, the `age` column will start at one billion for a freshly-vacuumed database. When the `age` approaches two billion, the database must be vacuumed again to avoid risk of wraparound failures. Recommended practice is to `VACUUM` each database at least once every half-a-billion (500 million) transactions, so as to provide plenty of safety margin. To help meet this rule, each database-wide `VACUUM` automatically delivers a warning if there are any `pg_database` entries showing an `age` of more than 1.5 billion transactions, for example:

    play=# VACUUM;
    WARNING:  some databases have not been vacuumed in 1613770184 transactions
    HINT:  Better vacuum them within 533713463 transactions, or you may have a wraparound failure.
    VACUUM

`VACUUM` with the `FREEZE` option uses a more aggressive freezing policy: row versions are frozen if they are old enough to be considered good by all open transactions. In particular, if a `VACUUM FREEZE` is performed in an otherwise-idle database, it is guaranteed that all row versions in that database will be frozen. Hence, as long as the database is not modified in any way, it will not need subsequent vacuuming to avoid transaction ID wraparound problems. This technique is used by `initdb` to prepare the `template0` database. It should also be used to prepare any user-created databases that are to be marked `datallowconn` = `false` in `pg_database`, since there isn't any convenient way to `VACUUM` a database that you can't connect to. Note that `VACUUM`'s automatic warning message about unvacuumed databases will ignore `pg_database` entries with `datallowconn` = `false`, so as to avoid giving false warnings about these databases; therefore it's up to you to ensure that such databases are frozen correctly.

Warning
To be sure of safety against transaction wraparound, it is necessary to vacuum every table, including system catalogs, in every database at least once every billion transactions. We have seen data loss situations caused by people deciding that they only needed to vacuum their active user tables, rather than issuing database-wide vacuum commands. That will appear to work fine ... for a while.

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