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vacuumdb

Name

vacuumdb -- garbage-collect and analyze a PostgreSQL database

Synopsis

Description

vacuumdb is a utility for cleaning a PostgreSQL database. vacuumdb will also generate internal statistics used by the PostgreSQL query optimizer.

vacuumdb is a shell script wrapper around the backend command VACUUM via the PostgreSQL interactive terminal psql. There is no effective difference between vacuuming databases via this or other methods. psql must be found by the script and a database server must be running at the targeted host. Also, any default settings and environment variables available to psql and the libpq front-end library do apply.

vacuumdb might need to connect several times to the PostgreSQL server, asking for a password each time. It is convenient to have a $HOME/.pgpass file in such cases.

Options

vacuumdb accepts the following command-line arguments:

[-d] dbname [--dbname] dbname: Specifies the name of the database to be cleaned or analyzed. If this is not specified and -a (or --all) is not used, the database name is read from the environment variable PGDATABASE. If that is not set, the user name specified for the connection is used.
-a --all: Vacuum all databases.
-e --echo: Echo the commands that vacuumdb generates and sends to the server.
-f --full: Perform "full" vacuuming.
-q --quiet: Do not display a response.
-t table [ (column [,...]) ] --table table [ (column [,...]) ]: Clean or analyze table only. Column names may be specified only in conjunction with the --analyze option.
Tip: If you specify columns to vacuum, you probably have to escape the parentheses from the shell.
-v --verbose: Print detailed information during processing.
-z --analyze: Calculate statistics for use by the optimizer.

vacuumdb also accepts the following command-line arguments for connection parameters:

-h host --host host: Specifies the host name of the machine on which the server is running. If host begins with a slash, it is used as the directory for the Unix domain socket.
-p port --port port: Specifies the Internet TCP/IP port or local Unix domain socket file extension on which the server is listening for connections.
-U username --username username: User name to connect as
-W --password: Force password prompt.

Diagnostics

VACUUM: Everything went well.
vacuumdb: Vacuum failed.: Something went wrong. vacuumdb is only a wrapper script. See VACUUM and psql for a detailed discussion of error messages and potential problems.

Environment

PGDATABASE PGHOST PGPORT PGUSER: Default connection parameters.

Examples

To clean the database test:

$ vacuumdb test

To clean and analyze for the optimizer a database named bigdb:

$ vacuumdb --analyze bigdb

To clean a single table foo in a database named xyzzy, and analyze a single column bar of the table for the optimizer:

$ vacuumdb --analyze --verbose --table 'foo(bar)' xyzzy

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