Tom, Sound excellent. Index growth has been something that always bothered me (not the disk space usage, but the slow searches).
I believe it's best to have pages marked dead at the time the last key contained in the page is deleted (you didn't discuss how efficient this is), because this will somehow improve the three depth. The same functionality should be available in VACUUM (just in case). Thus we should 'free' the index pages with one VACUUM run, instead of two. In the spirit of my ramblings about automatic statistics/suggestions by PostgreSQL for optimizations, could you also implement a NOTICE when the index becomes too 'thin'? I believe this will help avoid severe performance degradation if the process of removing the dead tuples becomes automatic. It also occurs to me, that if such statistics are available, PostgreSQL might run VACUUM automatically, on specific tables/indexes - all this controlled by a CUG variable. Daniel ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/faq.html
