REPACK in Core
October 20–23
There is a lot of excitement around the new REPACK command in Postgres 19, but how much of that is hype rather than something that will actually help? In this talk we will walk through a brief history of bloat management in Postgres, covering commands like CLUSTER and the evolution of VACUUM FULL, and discuss how tools like pg_repack and pg_squeeze came to be, including why we even have two different tools. But most importantly, we will review the new REPACK command (and its ever so important CONCURRENTLY option), and explain how it works, how it is meant to be used, and explore topics like ease of use, scheduling, and other items involved with operational complexity. If you have ever had to wrestle with bloat management in Postgres, this talk will help provide actionable advice for keeping production tables lean with minimal risk.
