Andrew Sullivan <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 12:23:01PM -0700, Sriram Dandapani wrote: >> Is there a way to monitor vacuum progress. Can I resume normal >> operations assuming vacuum will update the transaction ids or should I >> wait till it finishes. > That depends on how many transactions you think will happen while > vacuum is running. If it's a lot, you could pass the fatal point (== > you lose data) before vacuum finishes. He's apparently running 8.1 (I don't think that error message wording exists in older releases), so what would happen is that the DB will refuse to start new transactions; but there won't be any data lost. Still it might be best to let the vacuum have all the machine's cycles to get done as fast as possible. regards, tom lane