Retiring storage locations

You can retire a storage location to stop using it. Retiring a storage location prevents Vertica from storing data or temp files to it, but does not remove the actual location. Any data previously stored on the retired location is eventually merged out by the Tuple Mover. Use the RETIRE_LOCATION function to retire a location.

The following example retires a location from a single node:

=> SELECT RETIRE_LOCATION('/secondStorageLocation/' , 'v_vmartdb_node0004');

To retire a storage location on all nodes, use an empty string ('') for the second argument. If the location is SHARED, you can retire it only on all nodes.

You can expedite retiring and then dropping a storage location by passing an optional third argument, enforce, as true. With this directive, the function moves the data out of the storage location instead of waiting for the Tuple Mover, allowing you to drop the location immediately.

You can also use the ENFORCE_OBJECT_STORAGE_POLICY function to trigger the move for all storage locations at once, which allows you to drop the locations. This approach is equivalent to using the enforce argument.

The following example shows how to retire a storage location on all nodes so that it can be immediately dropped:

=> SELECT RETIRE_LOCATION('/secondStorageLocation/' , '', true);

Data and temp files can be stored in one, or multiple separate, storage locations.

For further information on dropping a location after retiring it, see Dropping storage locations.