I've written a function which allows users to clean up the pending list. It takes the index name and returns the number of pending list pages deleted.
# select * from gin_clean_pending_list('foo_text_array_idx');
gin_clean_pending_list
------------------------
278
(1 row)
Time: 31994.880 ms
This is needed because there needs to be a way to offload this duty from the user backends, and the only other way to intentionaly clean up the list is by vacuum (and the rest of a vacuum can take days to run on a large table). Autoanalyze will also do it, but it hard to arrange for those to occur at need, and unless you drop default_statistics_target very low they can also take a long time. And if you do lower the target, it screws up your statistics, of course.
I've currently crammed it into pageinspect, simply because that is where I found the existing code which I used as an exemplar for writing this code.
But where does this belong? Core? Its own separate extension?
Cheers,
Jeff
