Maintenance Activities for PostgreSQL Databases in Amazon RDS and Aurora

This guide outlines maintenance activities necessary for PostgreSQL databases in Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora to prevent performance issues. It emphasizes the importance of regular maintenance tasks such as VACUUM and the role of multiversion concurrency control (MVCC) in maintaining database integrity. The document describes how MVCC allows for concurrent processing of transactions without blocking readers and writers, thus ensuring atomicity and isolation. It details the necessity of vacuuming and analyzing tables, both automatically through the autovacuum daemon and manually, to manage dead tuples and reclaim storage space. The guide further explains the implications of database bloat and the importance of tuning autovacuum parameters to optimize performance. Additionally, it discusses the process of rebuilding indexes and provides examples of reclaiming space using various methods. Overall, the guide serves as a comprehensive resource for database administrators to enhance the performance and reliability of PostgreSQL databases hosted on AWS.