Nominatim/docs/admin/Maintenance.md

This chapter describes the various operations the Nominatim database administrator
may use to clean and maintain the database. None of these operations is mandatory
but they may help improve the performance and accuracy of results.


## Updating postcodes

Command: `nominatim refresh --postcodes`

Postcode centroids (aka 'calculated postcodes') are generated by looking at all
postcodes of a country, grouping them and calculating the geometric centroid.
There is currently no logic to deal with extreme outliers (typos or other
mistakes in OSM data). There is also no check if a postcodes adheres to a
country's format, e.g. if Swiss postcodes are 4 digits.

When running regular updates, postcodes results can be improved by running
this command on a regular basis. Note that only the postcode table and the
postcode search terms are updated. The postcode that is assigned to each place
is only updated when the place is updated.

The command takes around 70min to run on the planet and needs ca. 40GB of
temporary disk space.


## Updating word counts

Command: `nominatim refresh --word-counts`

Nominatim keeps frequency statistics about all search terms it indexes. These
statistics are currently used to optimise queries to the database. Thus better
statistics mean better performance. Word counts are created once after import
and are usually sufficient even when running regular updates. You might want
to rerun the statistics computation when adding larger amounts of new data,
for example, when adding an additional country via `nominatim add-data`.


## Forcing recomputation of places and areas

Command: `nominatim refresh --data-object [NWR]<id> --data-area [NWR]<id>`

When running replication updates, Nominatim tries to recompute the search
and address information for all places that are affected by a change. But it
needs to restrict the total number of changes to make sure it can keep up
with the minutely updates. Therefore it will refrain from propagating changes
that affect a lot of objects.

The administrator may force an update of places in the database.
`nominatim refresh --data-object` invalidates a single OSM object.
`nominatim refresh --data-area` invalidates an OSM object and all dependent
objects. That are usually the places that inside its area or around the
center of the object. Both commands expect the OSM object as an argument
of the form OSM type + OSM id. The type must be `N` (node), `W` (way) or
`R` (relation).

After invalidating the object, indexing must be run again. If continuous
update are running in the background, the objects will be recomputed together
with the next round of updates. Otherwise you need to run `nominatim index`
to finish the recomputation.


## Removing large deleted objects

Command: `nominatim admin --clean-deleted <PostgreSQL Time Interval>`

Nominatim refuses to delete very large areas because often these deletions are
accidental and are reverted within hours. Instead the deletions are logged in
the `import_polygon_delete` table and left to the administrator to clean up.

To run this command you will need to pass a PostgreSQL time interval. For example to 
delete any objects that have been deleted more than a month ago you would run:
`nominatim admin --clean-deleted '1 month'`