REINDEX — rebuild indexes
REINDEX [ ( VERBOSE ) ] { INDEX | TABLE | SCHEMA | DATABASE | SYSTEM } [ CONCURRENTLY ] name
REINDEX rebuilds an index using the data
stored in the index's table, replacing the old copy of the index. There are
several scenarios in which to use REINDEX:
An index has become corrupted, and no longer contains valid
data. Although in theory this should never happen, in
practice indexes can become corrupted due to software bugs or
hardware failures. REINDEX provides a
recovery method.
An index has become “bloated”, that is it contains many
empty or nearly-empty pages. This can occur with B-tree indexes in
PostgreSQL under certain uncommon access
patterns. REINDEX provides a way to reduce
the space consumption of the index by writing a new version of
the index without the dead pages. See Section 24.2 for more information.
You have altered a storage parameter (such as fillfactor) for an index, and wish to ensure that the change has taken full effect.
If an index build fails with the CONCURRENTLY option,
this index is left as “invalid”. Such indexes are useless
but it can be convenient to use REINDEX to rebuild
them. Note that only REINDEX INDEX is able
to perform a concurrent build on an invalid index.
INDEXRecreate the specified index.
TABLERecreate all indexes of the specified table. If the table has a secondary “TOAST” table, that is reindexed as well.
SCHEMA
Recreate all indexes of the specified schema. If a table of this
schema has a secondary “TOAST” table, that is reindexed as
well. Indexes on shared system catalogs are also processed.
This form of REINDEX cannot be executed inside a
transaction block.
DATABASE
Recreate all indexes within the current database.
Indexes on shared system catalogs are also processed.
This form of REINDEX cannot be executed inside a
transaction block.
SYSTEM
Recreate all indexes on system catalogs within the current database.
Indexes on shared system catalogs are included.
Indexes on user tables are not processed.
This form of REINDEX cannot be executed inside a
transaction block.
name
The name of the specific index, table, or database to be
reindexed. Index and table names can be schema-qualified.
Presently, REINDEX DATABASE and REINDEX SYSTEM
can only reindex the current database, so their parameter must match
the current database's name.
CONCURRENTLYWhen this option is used, PostgreSQL will rebuild the index without taking any locks that prevent concurrent inserts, updates, or deletes on the table; whereas a standard index rebuild locks out writes (but not reads) on the table until it's done. There are several caveats to be aware of when using this option — see Rebuilding Indexes Concurrently.
VERBOSEPrints a progress report as each index is reindexed.
If you suspect corruption of an index on a user table, you can
simply rebuild that index, or all indexes on the table, using
REINDEX INDEX or REINDEX TABLE.
Things are more difficult if you need to recover from corruption of
an index on a system table. In this case it's important for the
system to not have used any of the suspect indexes itself.
(Indeed, in this sort of scenario you might find that server
processes are crashing immediately at start-up, due to reliance on
the corrupted indexes.) To recover safely, the server must be started
with the -P option, which prevents it from using
indexes for system catalog lookups.
One way to do this is to shut down the server and start a single-user
PostgreSQL server
with the -P option included on its command line.
Then, REINDEX DATABASE, REINDEX SYSTEM,
REINDEX TABLE, or REINDEX INDEX can be
issued, depending on how much you want to reconstruct. If in
doubt, use REINDEX SYSTEM to select
reconstruction of all system indexes in the database. Then quit
the single-user server session and restart the regular server.
See the postgres reference page for more
information about how to interact with the single-user server
interface.
Alternatively, a regular server session can be started with
-P included in its command line options.
The method for doing this varies across clients, but in all
libpq-based clients, it is possible to set
the PGOPTIONS environment variable to -P
before starting the client. Note that while this method does not
require locking out other clients, it might still be wise to prevent
other users from connecting to the damaged database until repairs
have been completed.
REINDEX is similar to a drop and recreate of the index
in that the index contents are rebuilt from scratch. However, the locking
considerations are rather different. REINDEX locks out writes
but not reads of the index's parent table. It also takes an exclusive lock
on the specific index being processed, which will block reads that attempt
to use that index. In contrast, DROP INDEX momentarily takes
an exclusive lock on the parent table, blocking both writes and reads. The
subsequent CREATE INDEX locks out writes but not reads; since
the index is not there, no read will attempt to use it, meaning that there
will be no blocking but reads might be forced into expensive sequential
scans.
Reindexing a single index or table requires being the owner of that
index or table. Reindexing a schema or database requires being the
owner of that schema or database. Note that is therefore sometimes
possible for non-superusers to rebuild indexes of tables owned by
other users. However, as a special exception, when
REINDEX DATABASE, REINDEX SCHEMA
or REINDEX SYSTEM is issued by a non-superuser,
indexes on shared catalogs will be skipped unless the user owns the
catalog (which typically won't be the case). Of course, superusers
can always reindex anything.
Reindexing partitioned tables or partitioned indexes is not supported. Each individual partition can be reindexed separately instead.
Rebuilding an index can interfere with regular operation of a database. Normally PostgreSQL locks the table whose index is rebuilt against writes and performs the entire index build with a single scan of the table. Other transactions can still read the table, but if they try to insert, update, or delete rows in the table they will block until the index rebuild is finished. This could have a severe effect if the system is a live production database. Very large tables can take many hours to be indexed, and even for smaller tables, an index rebuild can lock out writers for periods that are unacceptably long for a production system.
PostgreSQL supports rebuilding indexes with minimum locking
of writes. This method is invoked by specifying the
CONCURRENTLY option of REINDEX. When this option
is used, PostgreSQL must perform two scans of the table
for each index that needs to be rebuilt and wait for termination of
all existing transactions that could potentially use the index.
This method requires more total work than a standard index
rebuild and takes significantly longer to complete as it needs to wait
for unfinished transactions that might modify the index. However, since
it allows normal operations to continue while the index is being rebuilt, this
method is useful for rebuilding indexes in a production environment. Of
course, the extra CPU, memory and I/O load imposed by the index rebuild
may slow down other operations.
The following steps occur in a concurrent reindex. Each step is run in a separate transaction. If there are multiple indexes to be rebuilt, then each step loops through all the indexes before moving to the next step.
A new temporary index definition is added to the catalog
pg_index. This definition will be used to replace
the old index. A SHARE UPDATE EXCLUSIVE lock at
session level is taken on the indexes being reindexed as well as their
associated tables to prevent any schema modification while processing.
A first pass to build the index is done for each new index. Once the
index is built, its flag pg_index.indisready is
switched to “true” to make it ready for inserts, making it
visible to other sessions once the transaction that performed the build
is finished. This step is done in a separate transaction for each
index.
Then a second pass is performed to add tuples that were added while the first pass was running. This step is also done in a separate transaction for each index.
All the constraints that refer to the index are changed to refer to the
new index definition, and the names of the indexes are changed. At
this point, pg_index.indisvalid is switched to
“true” for the new index and to “false” for
the old, and a cache invalidation is done causing all sessions that
referenced the old index to be invalidated.
The old indexes have pg_index.indisready switched to
“false” to prevent any new tuple insertions, after waiting
for running queries that might reference the old index to complete.
The old indexes are dropped. The SHARE UPDATE
EXCLUSIVE session locks for the indexes and the table are
released.
If a problem arises while rebuilding the indexes, such as a
uniqueness violation in a unique index, the REINDEX
command will fail but leave behind an “invalid” new index in addition to
the pre-existing one. This index will be ignored for querying purposes
because it might be incomplete; however it will still consume update
overhead. The psql \d command will report
such an index as INVALID:
postgres=# \d tab
Table "public.tab"
Column | Type | Modifiers
--------+---------+-----------
col | integer |
Indexes:
"idx" btree (col)
"idx_ccnew" btree (col) INVALID
The recommended recovery method in such cases is to drop the invalid index
and try again to perform REINDEX CONCURRENTLY. The
concurrent index created during the processing has a name ending in the
suffix ccnew, or ccold if it is an
old index definition which we failed to drop. Invalid indexes can be
dropped using DROP INDEX, including invalid toast
indexes.
Regular index builds permit other regular index builds on the same table
to occur simultaneously, but only one concurrent index build can occur on a
table at a time. In both cases, no other types of schema modification on
the table are allowed meanwhile. Another difference is that a regular
REINDEX TABLE or REINDEX INDEX
command can be performed within a transaction block, but REINDEX
CONCURRENTLY cannot.
REINDEX SYSTEM does not support
CONCURRENTLY since system catalogs cannot be reindexed
concurrently.
Furthermore, indexes for exclusion constraints cannot be reindexed
concurrently. If such an index is named directly in this command, an
error is raised. If a table or database with exclusion constraint indexes
is reindexed concurrently, those indexes will be skipped. (It is possible
to reindex such indexes without the CONCURRENTLY option.)
Rebuild a single index:
REINDEX INDEX my_index;
Rebuild all the indexes on the table my_table:
REINDEX TABLE my_table;
Rebuild all indexes in a particular database, without trusting the system indexes to be valid already:
$export PGOPTIONS="-P"$psql broken_db... broken_db=> REINDEX DATABASE broken_db; broken_db=> \q
Rebuild indexes for a table, without blocking read and write operations on involved relations while reindexing is in progress:
REINDEX TABLE CONCURRENTLY my_broken_table;
There is no REINDEX command in the SQL standard.