vacuumdb is a utility for cleaning a PostgreSQL database. vacuumdb will also generate internal statistics used by the PostgreSQL query optimizer.
vacuumdb is a wrapper around the SQL command VACUUM. There is no effective difference between vacuuming databases via this utility and via other methods for accessing the server.
Options
vacuumdb accepts the following command-line arguments:
-a --all
Vacuum all databases.
[-d] dbname [--dbname] dbname
Specifies the name of the database to be cleaned or analyzed. If this is not specified and -a (or --all) is not used, the database name is read from the environment variable PGDATABASE. If that is not set, the user name specified for the connection is used.
-e --echo
Echo the commands that vacuumdb generates and sends to the server.
Clean or analyze table only. Column names may be specified only in conjunction with the --analyze option.
Tip: If you specify columns, you probably have to escape the parentheses from the shell. (See examples below.)
-v --verbose
Print detailed information during processing.
-z --analyze
Calculate statistics for use by the optimizer.
vacuumdb also accepts the following command-line arguments for connection parameters:
-h host --host host
Specifies the host name of the machine on which the server is running. If the value begins with a slash, it is used as the directory for the Unix domain socket.
-p port --port port
Specifies the TCP port or local Unix domain socket file extension on which the server is listening for connections.
-U username --username username
User name to connect as
-W --password
Force password prompt.
Environment
PGDATABASE PGHOST PGPORT PGUSER
Default connection parameters
Diagnostics
In case of difficulty, see VACUUM and psql for discussions of potential problems and error messages. The database server must be running at the targeted host. Also, any default connection settings and environment variables used by the libpq front-end library will apply.
Notes
vacuumdb might need to connect several times to the PostgreSQL server, asking for a password each time. It is convenient to have a $HOME/.pgpass file in such cases. See Section 27.11 for more information.
Examples
To clean the database test:
$ vacuumdb test
To clean and analyze for the optimizer a database named bigdb:
$ vacuumdb --analyze bigdb
To clean a single table foo in a database named xyzzy, and analyze a single column bar of the table for the optimizer:
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