Michael is joined by Chelsea Dole, Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead of the Data Storage Team at Brex, to discuss bloat. They cover what it is, why it's a problem, strategies for minimising it, and the options when it's really bad.
 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

• Managing your tuple graveyard (talk by Chelsea) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAgbzvGT6ck
• pgstattuple https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgstattuple.html 
• pg_class https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/catalog-pg-class.html 
• Bloat in PostgreSQL: a taxonomy (talk by Peter Geoghegan) https://youtube.com/watch?v=JDG4bMHxCH8 
• It's Not You, It's Me: Breaking Up with Massive Tables via Partitioning (talk by Chelsea) https://youtube.com/watch?v=TafwSuLNxe8 
• pg_repack https://github.com/reorg/pg_repack
• pg_squeeze https://github.com/cybertec-postgresql/pg_squeeze 
• VACUUM https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-vacuum.html
• autovacuum https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-autovacuum.html 
• CLUSTER https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-cluster.html 
• HOT updates https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/storage-hot.html 
• Our episode on BUFFERS https://postgres.fm/episodes/buffers-by-default 
• Our episode on TOAST https://postgres.fm/episodes/toast 
• Our episode on index maintenance https://postgres.fm/episodes/index-maintenance 
• Chelsea's website: https://chelseadole.com/

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

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Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With special thanks to:

• Jessie Draws for the amazing artwork