Tom, thanks much for your help, the cluster command did the trick. fyi running 8.1.2 On Sat, 2006-04-29 at 14:48 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > Warren Little <warren.little@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > Could this be the reference to the toast table that is preventing the > > vacuum from deleting the toast data? And what purges "dropped" columns > > if not a full vacuum. > > Actually, the way that toast references work is that they'll go away at > the next update of the row containing the reference. The reason you've > still got a pile of unremovable toast data is evidently that a lot of > the parent table's rows have remained untouched since the wide bytea > column existed. (We choose not to do this housekeeping immediately > during DROP COLUMN, but to defer it until the next row update.) > > One way to clean up the junk would be to do a trivial full-table update > ("UPDATE foo SET f1 = f1") and then VACUUM FULL, but there are other > ways that are more efficient. If you're using a PG version released > within the last year, CLUSTER will do the job nicely. > > regards, tom lane -- Warren Little Chief Technology Officer Meridias Capital Inc 1018 W Atherton Dr SLC, UT 84123 ph 866.369.7763