One thing I get sick of is MySQL users bashing PostgreSQL for having the VACUUM command. They basically say the usual: VACUUM is slow, it’s flawed design, why should I have to VACUUM, etc. This, despite the fact that MySQL has a command that does almost the exact same thing, the difference of course being that PostgreSQL also collects stats from the database to optimize how the planner functions.

VACUUM, of course, is slow and uses a lot of CPU/Disk, but seriously, what’s stopping you from setting up a cron script that does `echo “VACUUM ANALYZE” | nice -n 19 psql database_name`, every night at midnight? I have a ~300MB database, and it takes all of three seconds to VACUUM ANALYZE. The only problem would be if you have a humongous database, or a slow server.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under MySQL, PostgreSQL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.