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The Lounge War Stories Data Centre meets Vacuum Cleaner Post 303014244 by Don Cragun on Thursday 8th of March 2018 04:25:31 AM
Old 03-08-2018
Many years ago, while I was working at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on adding POSIX-conformance into SunOS 4.1, I was making changes to the OS and utilities during the day and running complete builds of the system overnight (starting a build just before I left work in the evening). This worked fine for several weeks until one Monday night when the system died at about 8:30pm killing the build-in-progress. There was no core dump, no indication of any hardware problems, and restarting the build when I got to work Tuesday morning completed normally (taking a little over three hours to complete).

The same thing happened the next three days in a row, with the system always dying sometime between 8:20pm and 8:40pm.

I decided to stay at work late Friday evening to see if I could figure out what was causing the crashes. I went to the bathroom at about 7pm so I would be sure that I could be at my computer by 7:15pm and would be able to stay there until I found out why my computer was dying every night. When I got back to my office five minutes later, I found that my computer had been unplugged by a member of the cleaning crew so he could plug in the vacuum cleaner they used to clean the hallway and offices where my office was located. (The way my office was arranged left a power strip close to the hallway while other offices in my area had their power strips in less accessible locations.) I unplugged the sweeper, plugged my computer back in, and waited for the cleaning guy to come back to my office.

I found out that:
  1. the cleaning crew comes in an hour and a half earlier on Friday that they did Monday through Thursday,
  2. they got a new vacuum cleaner on Monday with a cord that wouldn't reach from the plugs in the conference room to the other end of the building, and
  3. unplugging a computer is inconsequential to a janitor if doing so allows him to sweep the carpets at the end of the hallway.
 

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VACUUMDB(1)						  PostgreSQL Client Applications					       VACUUMDB(1)

NAME
vacuumdb - garbage-collect and analyze a PostgreSQL database SYNOPSIS
vacuumdb [ connection-options... ] [ --full | -f ] [ --verbose | -v ] [ --analyze | -z ] [ --table | -t 'table [ ( column [,...] ) ]' ] [ dbname ] vacuumdb [ connection-options... ] [ --all | -a ] [ --full | -f ] [ --verbose | -v ] [ --analyze | -z ] DESCRIPTION
vacuumdb is a utility for cleaning a PostgreSQL database. vacuumdb will also generate internal statistics used by the PostgreSQL query optimizer. vacuumdb is a shell script wrapper around the backend command VACUUM [vacuum(7)] via the PostgreSQL interactive terminal psql(1). There is no effective difference between vacuuming databases via this or other methods. psql must be found by the script and a database server must be running at the targeted host. Also, any default settings and environment variables available to psql and the libpq front-end library do apply. 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. OPTIONS
vacuumdb accepts the following command-line arguments: [-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. -a --all Vacuum all databases. -e --echo Echo the commands that vacuumdb generates and sends to the server. -f --full Perform ``full'' vacuuming. -q --quiet Do not display a response. -t table [ (column [,...]) ] --table table [ (column [,...]) ] Clean or analyze table only. Column names may be specified only in conjunction with the --analyze option. Tip: If you specify columns to vacuum, you probably have to escape the parentheses from the shell. -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 host begins with a slash, it is used as the directory for the Unix domain socket. -p port --port port Specifies the Internet TCP/IP 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. DIAGNOSTICS
VACUUM Everything went well. vacuumdb: Vacuum failed. Something went wrong. vacuumdb is only a wrapper script. See VACUUM [vacuum(7)] and psql(1) for a detailed discussion of error mes- sages and potential problems. ENVIRONMENT
PGDATABASE PGHOST PGPORT PGUSER Default connection parameters. 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: $ vacuumdb --analyze --verbose --table 'foo(bar)' xyzzy SEE ALSO
VACUUM [vacuum(7)] Application 2002-11-22 VACUUMDB(1)
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