The Postgres project is famously bad at naming things. It turns out that VACUUM should have been called "accelerated database recovery": docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sq (Background: microsoft.com/en-us/research)
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It seems to only be concerned with physical fragmentation, which is unrelated. "Accelerated recovery" makes rollback/undo occur instantly by making the process logical and versioning rows directly, very much like Postgres. And like Postgres, old rows usually stored alongside new.
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Coming from SQL Server side and starting to learn PostgresSQL now, I would agree with your comment. In Postgres, the names appears to reflect on "What is does" (impleme notation) whereas with SQL Server, the names are chosen to reflect on "What it means for end users".
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