How to remove segments from Greenplum Database(GPDB)

Products

• VMware Tanzu Greenplum
• Greenplum
• Pivotal Data Suite Non Production Edition
• VMware Tanzu Data Suite
• VMware Tanzu Data Suite

Issue/Introduction

This article discusses the options available to reduce the number of segments in a GPDB cluster. 

 

 

Environment

Resolution

There is no option to remove a segment in GPDB while it is online. The recommended ways to reduce the number of segments in a cluster are: 
 

1. Migrate the data to a new cluster with fewer segments.
2. Backup, reinitialise the GPDB cluster with less segments and restore the data from the backup.

The gpcopy utility can be used to migrate data to a new cluster with a different number of segments. See Migrating Data with gpcopy

The data can be backed up using the gpbackup/gprestore utilities and restored to the the new cluster or reinitialised cluster with "--resize-cluster" option.