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>56.4. Visibility Map</A
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>Each heap relation has a Visibility Map
(VM) to keep track of which pages contain only tuples that are known to be
visible to all active transactions. It's stored
alongside the main relation data in a separate relation fork, named after the
filenode number of the relation, plus a <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>_vm</TT
> suffix. For example,
if the filenode of a relation is 12345, the VM is stored in a file called
<TT
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>12345_vm</TT
>, in the same directory as the main relation file.
Note that indexes do not have VMs.</P
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>The visibility map simply stores one bit per heap page. A set bit means
that all tuples on the page are known to be visible to all transactions.
This means that the page does not contain any tuples that need to be vacuumed.
This information can also be used by <I
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>index-only scans</I
> to answer
queries using only the index tuple.</P
><P
>The map is conservative in the sense that we make sure that whenever a bit is
set, we know the condition is true, but if a bit is not set, it might or
might not be true. Visibility map bits are only set by vacuum, but are
cleared by any data-modifying operations on a page.</P
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