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I am new to Postgresql and while going through it's features I came across with a concept of "Live and Dead Tuples" which was explained very clearly in this post and I am very clear about this concept now.

My question is that, does this concept applies on all other relational databases as well like Oracle or SQL Server or it's just in PostgreSQL ? Because I've worked with SQL Server previously and I never came across with this terminology before, maybe this never occurred to me before or I never had to use this so I couldn't figure it out.

Muhammad Asim
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Yes, the terminology you use appears to be DBMS-specific. In MS SQL Server, in particular, the official term is "ghost record", and the process behind physical row deletion is called Ghost Cleanup.

I'm sure other DBMS use their own terminology, as well.

Roger Wolf
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  • Is there a term for Oracle? Cannot find documentation for Oracle Databases. – Ayman Patel Feb 03 '21 at 08:47
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    @AymanPatel, I never worked with Oracle, but brief search shows that Oracle doesn't appear to reclaim the freed space after `delete`: https://stackoverflow.com/a/58899674 . To do that, you need something like `alter table ... move;`. – Roger Wolf Feb 03 '21 at 13:06
  • We had an issue when we wanted to delete rows since they consumed a lot of data. But the tablespace could not be reclaimed after deleting. Wanted to find RCA and your link might be useful to claim deleted tablespace – Ayman Patel Feb 03 '21 at 13:10