First, if you haven't done the first two that vyegorov suggests do it now. If you have already vacuumed, it is not clear what sort of damage you may have already done in this case. This error should not be possible on new versions of PostgreSQL due to a number of checks, and had you upgraded some time ago, this wouldn't have happened. I highly recommend trying to stay on supported branches in the future.
I want to take a moment and describe what likely caused the problem and what it means. The prognosis IMO is not good and recovering the data, if it is even possible, is likely to be expensive and time consuming. I sincerely hope you have a good backup from before the transaction wraparound. If not, ouch....
What Went Wrong
PostgreSQL uses something called MVCC, which means that old versions of rows are kept around until they are clearly no longer used. MVCC as practiced by PostgreSQL stamps each row with a minimum transaction and a maximum transaction, and uses these for visibility management. When a transaction rolls back those rows entered are no longer visible and those rows deleted remain visible. Transaction ID's are 32-bit integers.
Periodically you are supposed to vacuum PostgreSQL instances. This, among other things, manages MVCC so that fewer transaction id's need to be checked, manages free space in tables, and can reset the transaction id sequence.
When the transaction ID wraps around, bad things happen but they boil down to the fact that PostgreSQL can no longer be sure what rows are visible and what rows are not. Note thais applies not only to rows in your own tables but in the system catalogs as well. This is a very, very bad thing. The best approach, if you can do it, is to restore from a backup before the wraparound occurred. This is why databases and tables are not showing up and why vacuuming full duplicates them.
Why Upgrading Would have Fixed This
Modern versions of PostgreSQL come with autovacuum automatically enabled which runs vacuum processes in the background to help prevent this sort of problem. More recent versions also will refuse to start new transactions for non-superusers once wraparound is approaching. This gives you a chance to detect and correct the problem before you suffer possibly catastrophic data loss.
PostgreSQL 7.4 hasn't been supported in nearly three years. I don't know when the last time anything was vacuumed but it must have been billions of transactions ago. This is not good.
I don't know what resources you're getting this from. Not just that PgAdmin page given some of what you're saying. The information you're relying on is either outdated or incomplete; all this is pretty much unnecessary.
Make sure that autovacuum is keeping up with the database workload and you're pretty much done. These days you should not generally need to run a manual vacuum or analyze, though it's handy after bulk loads or deletes. Manually reindexing is certainly not required as a routine operation.
See autovacuum in the docs.
Best Answer
You do not need to reindex, because
CLUSTEReffectively does it for you.More specifically,
CLUSTERlocks the source table then creates a new copy of it ordered according to the target index. It creates indexes on the new copy then replaces the old table and indexes with the new ones.Note that this is also true of
VACUUM FULLin 9.0+.If you've been seeing discussion suggesting that
CLUSTERbloats indexes it could be people who're assuming thatCLUSTERworks like pre-9.0VACUUM FULL. You might also be seeing and misreading discussions that mention index bloat caused by the oldVACUUM FULLimplementation and suggestingCLUSTERas an alternative.This is implied in the documentation:
What it doesn't say, but should, is that those temporary copies then replace the original table. (Bold mine).