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Investigation · Part 9 of 10 · Inside a database index
Deleted Rows Do Not Shrink the File: Free Pages and VACUUM
I deleted half of a SQLite table and the file kept exactly the same size. The table gave its pages to a freelist, the index stayed half empty, and new rows used the holes. VACUUM fixed everything in 0.4 s, but it wrote three times the size of the result to do it.