Re: Unsplitting btree index leaf pages

[Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>]

Kevin Brown <kevin(at)sysexperts(dot)com> writes:
> Well, REINDEX is apparently a very expensive operation right now.  But
> how expensive would it be to go through the entire index and perform
> the index page merge operation being discussed here, and nothing else?
> If it's fast enough, might it be worthwhile to implement just this
> alone as a separate maintenance command (e.g., VACUUM INDEX) that
> acquires the appropriate lock (AccessExclusive, I'd expect) on the
> index to prevent exactly the issues you're concerned about?
> If it's fast enough even on large tables, it would be a nice
> alternative to REINDEX, I'd think.

This would work, but it's hard to tell if it'd be worthwhile short
of actually doing an implementation and field-testing it ...

			regards, tom lane