On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Jennifer Spencer <jenniferm411@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If I do that, the primary will not be clean anymore. It will be as unvacuumed and index-bloated as the warm standby. Or am I missing something?
>
> If you've moved on, so to speak, with the new primary, you restart the
> old primary, now warm standby, the same way you initially created the
> warm standby. issue the start hot backup command to the primary, copy
> over all the data dir and start shipping WAL files to it before you
> start continuous recovery.
I think that Scott's point was that once you have brought the standby 'alive', you have no other option but to start over. Warm-Standby isn't for reindex type operations, i.e. it's a failover mechanism, not to be confused with a switchover mechanism which lets you move back and forth easily. Once you cut to the standby, you have to do a full re-sync to the old primary system. What you're looking for is a replication system like Slony.
Are indexing and vacuuming hurting so much that you can't do them online? Why not use 'create index concurrently' and set vacuum_cost_delay to help keep these operations from impacting your production system? What version of PG are you using?
-- Another Scott :-)
