On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 23:12, Tom Lane wrote: > Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 17:17, Ben wrote: > > If I create an index on a table that needs to be vacuumed in 7.3, will the > > dead rows get indexed as well? > > > Yes. I think. I'm pretty sure that's still true in 8.2. as well. The > > way indexes work is that the index points to the oldest version of a > > tuple in existence, said tuple which then points to the next newer > > version and so on. > > IIRC, CREATE INDEX will ignore tuples that are "definitely dead", ie, > too old to be visible to any open transaction. It *will* (and must) > index tuples that are recently dead but might still be visible to some > open transaction. So, it depends on one's definition of dead... I don't want to go on the cart...
