Re: BUG #5946: Long exclusive lock taken by vacuum (not full)

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@gmail.com>, Maxim Boguk <maxim.boguk@gmail.com>, pgsql-bugs <pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org>
Date: 2011-03-25T20:48:23Z
Lists: pgsql-bugs
Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 7:43 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> I don't recall any particular discussion of making the user contend with
>> that. My thought would be to do something like enlarging the table by
>> 10% anytime we need to extend it.

> Just for reference this is how Oracle *used* to behave. It was widely
> hated and led to all sorts of problems. Best practice was to pick a
> reasonable size for your tablespace and pre-allocate that size and set
> future increments to be that size with 0% growth.

Interesting, but I don't understand/believe your argument as to why this
is a bad idea or fixed-size extents are better.  It sounds to me just
like the typical Oracle DBA compulsion to have a knob to twiddle.  A
self-adjusting enlargement behavior seems smarter all round.

			regards, tom lane