PostgreSQL User's Guide
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# vacuumdb

## Name

vacuumdb — Clean and analyze a Postgres database

    vacuumdb [ options ] [ --analyze | -z ]
        [ --alldb | -a ] [ --verbose | -v ]
        [ --table 'table [ ( column [,...] ) ]' ] [ [-d] dbname ]

### Inputs

vacuumdb accepts the following command line arguments:

-d `dbname`, --dbname `dbname`

  Specifies the name of the database to be cleaned or analyzed.

-z, --analyze

  Calculate statistics on the database for use by the optimizer.

-a, --alldb

  Vacuum all databases.

-v, --verbose

  Print detailed information during processing.

-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.

vacuumdb also accepts the following command line arguments for connection parameters:

-h `host`, --host `host`

  Specifies the hostname of the machine on which the postmaster is running.

-p `port`, --port `port`

  Specifies the Internet TCP/IP port or local Unix domain socket file extension on which the postmaster is listening for connections.

-U `username`, --username `username`

  Username to connect as.

-W, --password

  Force password prompt.

-e, --echo

  Echo the commands that vacuumdb generates and sends to the backend.

-q, --quiet

  Do not display a response.

### Outputs

`VACUUM`

  Everything went well.

`vacuumdb: Vacuum failed.`

  Something went wrong. vacuumdb is only a wrapper script. See VACUUM and psql for a detailed discussion of error messages and potential problems.

## Description

vacuumdb is a utility for cleaning a Postgres database. vacuumdb will also generate internal statistics used by the Postgres query optimizer.

vacuumdb is a shell script wrapper around the backend command VACUUM via the Postgres interactive terminal psql. 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.

## Usage

To clean the database `test`:

    $ vacuumdb test

To analyze a database named `bigdb` for the optimizer:

    $ vacuumdb --analyze bigdb

To analyze a single column `bar` in table `foo` in a database named `xyzzy` for the optimizer:

    $ vacuumdb --analyze --verbose --table 'foo(bar)' xyzzy

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