It is not appropriate for deduplication to apply single value strategy
when triggered by a bottom-up index deletion pass. This wastes cycles
because later bottom-up deletion passes will overinterpret older
duplicate tuples that deduplication actually just skipped over "by
design". It also makes bottom-up deletion much less effective for low
cardinality indexes that happen to cross a meaningless "index has single
key value per leaf page" threshold.
To fix, slightly narrow the conditions under which deduplication's
single value strategy is considered. We already avoided the strategy
for a unique index, since our high level goal must just be to buy time
for VACUUM to run (not to buy space). We'll now also avoid it when we
just had a bottom-up pass that reported failure. The two cases share
the same high level goal, and already overlapped significantly, so this
approach is quite natural.
Oversight in commit d168b666, which added bottom-up index deletion.
Author: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-WznaOvM+Gyj-JQ0X=JxoMDxctDTYjiEuETdAGbF5EUc3MA@mail.gmail.com
Backpatch: 14-, where bottom-up deletion was introduced.
dd94c2852e