On Thu, 2024-05-09 at 09:58 -0400, Ron Johnson wrote: > Because vacuum is vacuum.
The problem is that the two commands do something different, so it would be misleading. Renaming VACUUM (FULL) is a good idea in principle, but I think that is more than 10 years too late. The compatibility break would be too painful.
Make VACUUM (FULL) a synonym for RECREATE TABLE, then say in the docs that VACUUM (FULL) is deprecated.
Then drop it in PG 27...
Perhaps you could write a patch to add a column "last_rewritten" to "pg_stat_all_tables"...
I'm a worse C programmer than I am a DBA.
It's never late.
I like the idea of RECREATE TABLE and deprecating VACUUM FULL a lot. It always seemed to me a non-user-friendly naming choice like pg_xlog or psql's \q, both of which are solved already.
With RECREATE TABLE, one day, we would be probably have RECREATE TABLE CONCURRENTLY implemented, making pg_repack less needed.