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Home 2016 October PostgreSQL: What is Visibility Map (VM)?

PostgreSQL: What is Visibility Map (VM)?

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The Visibility Map is one of the important architectural notes of PostgreSQL.

The Visibility Map associates with each Table and Index.

It stores in separate relation alongside with main relation and It starts with the file node number plus a suffix _vm.

The Visibility Map uses to keep track of which pages contain only tuples that are known to be visible to all active transactions.

It stores one bit per page. If it set bit, that means no free space on the page and all tuples can be visible to running transaction.

If you do not know about the MVCC (Multiversion Concurrency Control), please visit below an article.

What is Multi Version Concurrency Control (MVCC)

Why VACUUM requires in MVCC because VACUUM removes dead row versions in tables and marks the space available for future reuse.

With the Visibility Map, VACUUM will be now able to perform partial scans of the table data, skipping pages which marks as fully visible.

Now Database Administrator happy because partial scans require fewer I/O operations for VACUUM.

The Visibility map bits are only set by vacuum but are cleared by any data-modifying operations on a page.

Oct 9, 2016Anvesh Patel
PostgreSQL: What is a Free Space Map (FSM)?PostgreSQL: How the Rows are stored Physically using ctid?
Comments: 1
  1. sreelatha
    July 6, 2019 at 12:01 pm

    Hello iam sreelatha thank you for sharing your amazing ideas and thoughts.you gave easy and good information about visibility.thank you once again..

Anvesh Patel
Anvesh Patel

Database Engineer

October 9, 2016 PostgreSQL_vm, Anvesh Patel, Architecture, database, database research and development, dbrnd, Multiversion Concurrency Control, MVCC, plpgsql, Postgres Query, postgresql, PostgreSQL Administrator, PostgreSQL Error, PostgreSQL Programming, PostgreSQL Tips and Tricks, visibility map
About Me!

I'm Anvesh Patel, a Database Engineer certified by Oracle and IBM. I'm working as a Database Architect, Database Optimizer, Database Administrator, Database Developer. Providing the best articles and solutions for different problems in the best manner through my blogs is my passion. I have more than six years of experience with various RDBMS products like MSSQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Greenplum and currently learning and doing research on BIGData and NoSQL technology. -- Hyderabad, India.

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