Angva wrote:
Looking for a small bit of advice...
I have a script that updates several tables with large amounts of data.
Before running the updates, it drops all indexes for optimal
performance. When the updates have finished, I run the following
procedure:
recreate the indexes
cluster the tables
vacuum full analyze on the tables
Hi all,
I'd like to see a general way to take indexes off line without actually
losing their definitions. For example, something like "ALTER TABLE [EN
| DIS] ABLE INDEXES", "ALTER INDEX [EN | DIS] ABLE", etc. This could
also be used internally when a backend encounters an error
reading/writing an index. Rather than refusing to execute queries, it
could just ignore indexes it knows are disabled or bad in some way and
re-plan as needed.
This would have two benefits. First, the above scenerio would be much
simpler. Rather than dropping and re-creating new indexes, you could
just disable and then re-enable them without having any knowledge of
their structure. Secondly, it would allow us to put indexes in an
alternate table space on a non-redundant volume and, in the case of a
drive failure, be able to limp along, and get the system back to normal
simply by replacing the disk and issuing a REINDEX command.
I realize there are a couple gotchas with this. For example, what to do
with unique indexes? Perhaps a backend would still need to refuse to do
update/inserts on a table with degraded unique indexes, unless the index
was disabled explicitly? And then, refuse to rebuild/re-enable the
index as normal if non-unique values found?
Thx for considering :-)
-Glen Parker
