Logging autovacuum and analyzing activity in PostgreSQL

As undos and past images are stored within the same table but not in a separate UNDO tablespace, it is important to have a cleanup process that removes the undo data. Autovacuum is the process that is responsible for performing this cleanup. At the same time, it is also important to have the statistics updated for the tables periodically based on the DML activity. For this purpose, the same autovacuum takes an additional responsibility of running ANALYZE on tables to update the statistics. Tuning autovacuum in PostgreSQL is one of the crucial tasks for an admin as the performance of the database can be impacted if autovacuum does not kick in for the tables at the right time. Sometimes, running autovacuum more adversely may cause performance issues due to a lot of writes or CPU/memory utilization. In this recipe, we shall discuss the steps involved in logging autovacuum vacuum and autovacuum analyze for analyzing vacuum activity....