> Yup, I even tried manually running 'VACUUM FULL' and it didn't help. As
> for upgrading;
VACUUM FULL is usually considered a bad idea. What you probably want to
do instead is CLUSTER, followed by ANALYZE.
Basically, VACUUM makes the indexes smaller (but doesn't reclaim much
space from the tables themselves). VACUUM FULL reclaims space from the
tables, but bloats the indexes.
> a) I am trying to find a way around the dump/reload. I am doing it as a
> "last resort" only.
> b) I want to keep the version in CentOS' repo.
>
Postgres is pretty easy to build from source. It's nicely
self-contained, and won't bite you with dependency hell. So don't be too
wary of compiling it.
Richard