If you really want to know, read the mountains of (mostly) junk that have been written about replacing VACUUM in pgsql-hackers. The short answer (with apologies to Winston Churchill) is that VACUUM is the worst solution, except for all the others that have been suggested.
The lesser of 50 evils? ;) Joshua D. Drake
regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly