vacuumdb

Name

vacuumdb -- garbage-collect and analyze a PostgreSQL database

Synopsis

vacuumdb [connection-options...] [[-d] dbname] [--full | -f] [--verbose | -v] [--analyze | -z] [--table 'table [( column [,...] )]' ]

vacuumdb [connection-options...] [--all | -a] [--full | -f] [--verbose | -v] [--analyze | -z]

Inputs

vacuumdb accepts the following command line arguments:

-d dbname
--dbname dbname

Specifies the name of the database to be cleaned or analyzed.

-a
--alldb

Vacuum all databases.

-f
--full

Perform "full" vacuuming.

-v
--verbose

Print detailed information during processing.

-z
--analyze

Calculate statistics for use by the optimizer.

-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.

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

-h host
--host host

Specifies the hostname of the machine on which the postmaster 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 postmaster is listening for connections.

-U username
--username username

Username to connect as.

-W
--password

Force password prompt.

-e
--echo

Echo the commands that vacuumdb generates and sends to the backend.

-q
--quiet

Do not display a response.

Outputs

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.

Description

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

vacuumdb is a shell script wrapper around the backend command VACUUM via the Postgres 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.

Usage

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