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Summary

Autovacuum cannot keep up after Black Friday bulk deletes—and your BRIN index is not helping point lookups. Vacuum strategy on Aurora, plus Aurora Limitless and DynamoDB hot key mitigation.

Key Facts

  • • Vacuum strategy on Aurora, plus Aurora Limitless and DynamoDB hot key mitigation
  • • Aurora PostgreSQL (June 2026) still needs VACUUM—storage is auto-growing but dead tuple bloat hurts index efficiency and planner stats
  • • What to do this week 1
  • • 2
  • • 3

Entity Definitions

RDS
RDS is an AWS service discussed in this article.
Aurora
Aurora is an AWS service discussed in this article.
DynamoDB
DynamoDB is an AWS service discussed in this article.
CloudWatch
CloudWatch is an AWS service discussed in this article.

Related Content

PostgreSQL Vacuum, Index Bloat, and Sharding Hot Partitions on AWS

Cloud Architecture Palaniappan P 1 min read

Quick summary: Autovacuum cannot keep up after Black Friday bulk deletes—and your BRIN index is not helping point lookups. Vacuum strategy on Aurora, plus Aurora Limitless and DynamoDB hot key mitigation.

Key Takeaways

  • Vacuum strategy on Aurora, plus Aurora Limitless and DynamoDB hot key mitigation
  • Aurora PostgreSQL (June 2026) still needs VACUUM—storage is auto-growing but dead tuple bloat hurts index efficiency and planner stats
  • What to do this week 1
  • 2
  • 3
PostgreSQL Vacuum, Index Bloat, and Sharding Hot Partitions on AWS
Table of Contents

Aurora PostgreSQL (June 2026) still needs VACUUM—storage is auto-growing but dead tuple bloat hurts index efficiency and planner stats.

Index bloat

Heavy UPDATE/DELETE leaves dead tuples; autovacuum reclaims space. Tune autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor on large tables; watch n_dead_tup in pg_stat_user_tables.

Sharding and hot partitions

ServiceHot spot patternMitigation
DynamoDBSingle partition keyWrite sharding suffix, random salt, or DAX
Aurora LimitlessShard router hotspotsShard key cardinality review
RDS single writerN/ARead replicas + cache

Opinionated take: Shard SQL only after Aurora Limitless or proven partition strategy—avoid premature micro-shard ops burden.

What to do this week

  1. Alert on MaximumUsedTransactionIDs and autovacuum lag.
  2. REINDEX CONCURRENTLY on top bloated index after measurement.
  3. For DynamoDB throttling, enable CloudWatch ThrottledRequests per table.

What this guide doesn’t cover

Full Limitless migration—see Aurora Limitless blog if published.

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Palaniappan P

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