On Apr 22, 2008, at 8:35 AM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

Roberts, Jon wrote:

-With autovacuum, does it skip these rows still being referenced
in a transaction or does it wait?

It skips them, the idea being that a future vacuum will remove them.

Awesome. In a large data warehouse, the snapshot too old error is very annoying and I'm glad PostgreSQL is superior to Oracle in this regard.
:)

Well, the disadvantage of the PostgreSQL way is that it keeps dead rows
around for longer than they're actually needed, and so it causes some
problems in pathological conditions -- for example when setting up large
replication sets with Slony, or during a pg_dump, no dead rows can be
removed.  Since the Slony thing can take a very long time, dead rows
start to pile up in a way that can really harm performance.

In addition or rather, another potential issue, if you have a REALLY long transaction running then you can risk transaction id wraparound.

Erik Jones

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