# 1.3 The Table (The Warehouse)  When you have enough shipping containers (Pages) stacked together, you have a **Warehouse**. In Postgres, we call this a **Table** (or a Relation, if you want to sound like a professor). ## Stacking the Containers A table isn't a complex, mystical entity. It is fundamentally just a very long line of 8KB shipping containers stacked one after another. If a table is small, it might only be one container. If it’s massive, it could be millions of containers stretching across several physical files on the disk. ## The Manager (The Elephant) The Lazy Elephant doesn't like to wander aimlessly through the warehouse. To find a specific suitcase, the elephant usually starts at the very first container and walks past every single one until it finds what it’s looking for—this is called a **Sequential Scan**. As you can imagine, if the warehouse is six miles long, the elephant is going to be very cranky by the time it reaches the end. ## Cleanliness (The Vacuum) Because the elephant refuses to throw anything away, the warehouse floor quickly becomes cluttered with "Old" suitcases that have been crossed out with Sharpie. To prevent the warehouse from becoming infinite, a tiny robotic vacuum cleaner (the **Autovacuum**) wanders around. The vacuum's job is to find containers full of dead suitcases, throw them into the incinerator, and make sure the "Free Space" in those containers is ready for the next batch of luggage. Without the vacuum, the warehouse would eventually consume the entire universe.