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. Also, any default
settings and environment variables available to psql
and the libpq front-end library do apply.
vacuumdb might need to connect several
times to the PostgreSQL server, asking for
a password each time. It is convenient to have a
$HOME/.pgpass file in such cases.
Options
vacuumdb accepts the following command-line arguments:
[-d] dbname [--dbname] dbname
Specifies the name of the database to be cleaned or analyzed.
If this is not specified and -a (or
--all) is not used, the database name is read
from the environment variable PGDATABASE. If
that is not set, the user name specified for the connection is
used.
-a --all
Vacuum all databases.
-e --echo
Echo the commands that vacuumdb generates
and sends to the server.
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 probably have to escape the parentheses
from the shell.
-v --verbose
Print detailed information during processing.
-z --analyze
Calculate statistics for use by the optimizer.
vacuumdb also accepts
the following command-line arguments for connection parameters:
-h host --host host
Specifies the host name 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 server
is listening for connections.
-U username --username username
User name to connect as
-W --password
Force password prompt.
Diagnostics
VACUUM
Everything went well.
vacuumdb: Vacuum failed.
Something went wrong. vacuumdb is only a wrapper
script. See VACUUM
and psql for a detailed
discussion of error messages and potential problems.
Environment
PGDATABASE PGHOST PGPORT PGUSER
Default connection parameters.
Examples
To clean the database test:
$ vacuumdb test
To clean and analyze for the optimizer a database named
bigdb:
$ vacuumdb --analyze bigdb
To clean a single table
foo in a database named
xyzzy, and analyze a single column
bar of the table for the optimizer:
