VACUUM

Jen and I have been using a Dyson DC-15 Animal ever since we got an apartment together in 2007, and it has been showing its age for a while. The brush driver was extremely hard to turn by hand, it frequently left things behind, and one it has always emitted a high pitched tone that drove me to don firing-range hearing protection. I’d recently disassembled the agitation brush system to clean out a bunch of cat hair and dust that had caked itself into the gear assembly that drives the agitator.

As a DBA, I strive not to live in an isolated ivory tower, away from the developers that are destined to fill our databases with volumes of data from a myriad of applications. It’s important, I think, to occasionally come back to the basics. So I’d like to discuss one of the core elements that Postgres DBAs might be intimately familiar with, but comes up often enough that some clarification is warranted.