Re: Vacuum explained - Mailing list pgsql-admin

From Tilo Schwarz
Subject Re: Vacuum explained
Date
Msg-id 200301080013.24633.mail@tilo-schwarz.de
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Vacuum explained  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Vacuum explained
List pgsql-admin
Tom Lane writes:

> > Unused = # of tuples awaiting being reused
>
> These are not actually tuples, but tuple slots (page item pointers)
> that are open for re-use.

Maybe this is a good place to ask this: How do you actually reuse a tuple (or
the space the tuple needed on disk) if the number of bytes needed to store a
new tuple depends on the number of non null columns, the variable length
columns etc. (If I understood the documentation right, you store the tuples
within a page packed, i.e. variable length tuples are stored one after the
other, sometimes with alignment between the tuple header and the tuple data.)

Do you try to reuse tuples with a similar storage size (or something like
that) to prevent fragmentation or don't you have fragmentation by design (and
I miss something).

Any pointers to documentation or into the source code are welcome!

Regards,

    Tilo Schwarz

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