Vacuuming through pictures

Vacuuming through pictures: Andrew Dunstan and Tom Kincaid

Proper Vacuum operations is an important function of any Postgres deployment. Vacuum is at the core of many Postgres operational items. Having a Postgres deployment properly tuned for vacuum is critical for all successful Postgres production instances.

Unfortunately, may people struggle with the concepts behind vacuum and auto-vacuum. Hence, DBAs and Developers become extremely confused about how to tune the critical functionality associated with them (i.e. reclaiming dead tuples, freezing tuples and analyzing tables).

This talk will cover some key concepts of Postgres Vacuum and Autovacuum and some of the concepts around properly tuning Vacuum. While talks similar to this talk has been given many times before, this talk will be differentiated by the extensive use of diagrams, illustrations and animations to present the concepts around Postgres Vacuum and tuning Postgres Vacuum. The talk will be augmented with real life stories about how tuning vacuum properly makes a difference.

The primary audience of this talk are people who have often heard of Vacuum but have never quite understood why it is necessary and for people who do understand Postgres Vacuum but have struggled to explain it.