vacuumdb

Name

vacuumdb -- Clean and analyze a PostgreSQL database

Synopsis

vacuumdb [connection-options...] [[-d] dbname] [--full | -f] [--verbose | -v] [--analyze | -z] [--table 'table [( column [,...] )]' ]
vacuumdb [connection-options...] [--all | -a] [--full | -f] [--verbose | -v] [--analyze | -z]

Inputs

-d dbname, --dbname dbname

Specifies the name of the database to be cleaned or analyzed.

-z, --analyze

Calculate statistics on the database for use by the optimizer.

-a, --alldb

Vacuum all databases.

-v, --verbose

Print detailed information during processing.

-t table [ (column [,...]) ], --table table [ (column [,...]) ]

Clean or analyze table only. Column names may be specified only in conjunction with the --analyze option.

Tip

If you specify columns to vacuum, you need to escape the parentheses from the shell.

Connection Options

vacuumdb also accepts the following command line arguments for connection parameters:

-h host, --host host

Specifies the hostname of the machine on which the server is running. If host begins with a slash, it is used as the directory for the UNIX domain socket.

-p port, --port port

Specifies the Internet TCP/IP port or local UNIX domain socket file extension on which the postmaster is listening for connections.

-U username, --username username

Username to connect to the database as. (This is not your Linux user name.)

-W, --password

Force password prompt.

-e, --echo

Echo the commands that vacuumdb generates and sends to the backend.

-q, --quiet

Do not display a response.

Outputs

VACUUM

vacuumdb was successful.

vacuumdb: Vacuum failed.

vacuumdb failed. vacuumdb is only a wrapper script. See the section on psql for a detailed discussion of error messages and potential problems.

Description

vacuumdb is a utility for cleaning a PostgreSQL database. vacuumdb will also generate internal statistics used by the PostgreSQL query optimizer.

vacuumdb is a shell script wrapper around the backend command VACUUM via the PostgreSQL interactive terminal psql. There is no effective difference between vacuuming databases via this or other methods. psql must be found by the script and a database server must be running at the targeted host. Any default settings and environment variables available to psql and the libpq front-end library do apply.

Usage

To clean the database test:
$ vacuumdb test

To clean and analyze for the optimizer a database named bigdb:
$ vacuumdb --analyze bigdb

To analyze a single column bar in table foo in a database named xyzzy for the optimizer:
$ vacuumdb --analyze --verbose --table 'foo(bar)' xyzzy