I have a heavily used table (with around 5 million rows) in a PostgreSQL database in which I want to drop a column and reclaim the space the column used.
The docs suggest doing a table rewriting ALTER TABLE
to force the space back, but that is not safe to run while the table is used and would cause downtime. Are there any practical options that don't require any downtime? I tried to run the pgcompact
tool, but that did not change anything.