I spent some more time thinking about this new option.
On 22.01.2026 23:18, Sami Imseih wrote:
I can't help but think that this SMART option is not as smart as it should be to actually be valuable. I agree that we should never skip a table that has never been analyzed. My concern is that n_mod_since_analyze == 0 is not very useful.
IMO, for the purpose of ensuring that we never skip relations that have never been analyzed, checking last_analyze / last_autoanalyze being NULL seems sufficient and reliable.
What if I modify 1 tuple? does that really justify an ANALYZE to run on the table? Shouldn't the decision be driven based on some threshold calculation; similar to how autoanalyze makes the decision?
The primary purpose of ANALYZE is to allow users to explicitly rebuildstatistics when they believe it is necessary. When a user specifiesparticular tables or columns (e.g., ANALYZE table; or ANALYZE table(i, j); ), I would not expect them to use this newoption - in that case, the intent is usually to force statistics to berecollected.
However, the situation looks different when ANALYZE is run across theentire database (i.e., plain ANALYZE;). In that context, havingan option to skip relations that are known not to have changed sincetheir last analyze seems useful, as it avoids doing work that is clearlyunnecessary. That said, I think we still need to be precise about what exactly "relations that have not changed" means in this context, in order to understand where statistics would and would not be rebuilt. In particular, relying solely on n_mod_since_analyze == 0 does not seem sufficient, as we have already discussed several cases where ANALYZE may still be required even without direct data modifications (e.g. partitioned tables, inheritance, foreign tables, extended statistics, etc.)
About thresholds: I’m not convinced they make much sense for manualANALYZE. autovacuum already exists to decide when statistics need tobe refreshed based on thresholds, and if those conditions are met, itwill run automatically. I’m not sure there is much value in duplicatingthat logic for explicit ANALYZE commands.
What do you think? -- Best regards, Ilia Evdokimov, Tantor Labs LLC, https://tantorlabs.com/
