On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 07:53 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Simon Riggs <simon@2ndQuadrant.com> writes:
> > I think the issue is identifying the problem. Reading the title of the
> > post, I think Tom says "no" to *deleting* the toast table. He also says
> > "no" to cleaning the table as part of DROP COLUMN. That still leaves you
> > an opening for an out-of-line command/function to perform a clean,
>
> ... see CLUSTER ...
It's possible we'd want to do this even with no indexes on a table and
we definitely might want to do it without taking lengthy locks.
It's good that DROP COLUMN is very quick, but its not good that it
doesn't remove the space and there's no way to make it do that without
requiring locks to be held for long periods.
-- Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.comPostgreSQL Training, Services and Support