Bill, > Honestly, this seems like an inordinate amount of > babysitting for a production application. I'm not > sure if the client will be willing to accept it.
Well, then, tell them not to delete 75% of the rows in a table at once. I imagine that operation brought processing to a halt, too. > Admittedly my knowledge of the inner workings of an > RDBMS is limited, but could somebody explain to me why > this would be so? If you delete a bunch of rows why > doesn't the index get updated at the same time? It does get updated. What doesn't happen is the space getting reclaimed. In a *normal* data situation, those dead nodes would be replaced with new index nodes. However, a mass-delete-in-one-go messes that system up. > Is > this a common issue among all RDBMSs or is it > something that is PostgreSQL specific? Speaking from experience, this sort of thing affects MSSQL as well, although the maintenance routines are different. -- Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
