Re: [BUGS] BUG #10823: Better REINDEX syntax.

On 07/30/2014 07:46 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
>> On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 01:29:31PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> I don't find it all that odd. We should not be encouraging routine
>>> database-wide reindexes.
>
>> Uh, do we encourage database-wide VACUUM FULL or CLUSTER, as we use them
>> there with no parameter. Is there a reason REINDEX should be harder,
>> and require a dummy argument to run?
>
> I believe that REINDEX on system catalogs carries a risk of deadlock
> failures against other processes --- there was a recent example of that
> in the mailing lists. VACUUM FULL has such risks too, but that's been
> pretty well deprecated for many years. (I think CLUSTER is probably
> relatively safe on this score because it's not going to think any system
> catalogs are clustered.)
>
> If there were a variant of REINDEX that only hit user tables, I'd be fine
> with making that easy to invoke.

Here are two patches for this.

The first one, reindex_user_tables.v1.patch, implements the variant that
only hits user tables, as suggested by you.

The second one, reindex_no_dbname.v1.patch, allows the three
database-wide variants to omit the database name (voted for by Daniel
Migowski, Bruce, and myself; voted against by you). This patch is to be
applied on top of the first one.
--
Vik