Hi everyone,
On 20.01.2026 13:24, VASUKI M wrote:
I’m planning to work on a small improvement around ANALYZE behavior and wanted to ask the community for guidance before proceeding.
Thanks for working on this — it indeed looks like it could reduce the time spent executing ANALYZE.
Currently, when ANALYZE is run over many relations, it analyzes all eligible tables even if some of them have not changed since their last ANALYZE. In environments with many mostly-static tables, this can lead to repeated work with little benefit. I’m considering working on an optional mode where ANALYZE would skip relations that have not been modified since their last analyze, based on existing pg_stat counters (for example, mod_since_analyze = 0).
We should consider n_mod_since_analyze as well.
Before moving forward, I’d like to understand: --whether this aligns with PostgreSQL’s statistics and planner design, --if there are reasons ANALYZE should always re-run even for unchanged relations, --and whether such behavior would be acceptable if it were strictly opt-in. Any feedback, concerns, or pointers would be very helpful.
One concern that comes to mind is changes in statistics targets. For example, statistics may have been collected with default_statistics_target = 100, and later either default_statistics_target or a per-column statistics target is increased (e.g., to 200).
As far as I know, we currently do not track which statistics target was used when the existing statistics were collected. If someone knows a reliable way to determine this, please correct me.
If we cannot determine that, we would need to decide whether such relations should still be skipped
-- Best regards, Ilia Evdokimov, Tantor Labs LLC, https://tantorlabs.com/
