Thank you for your help.  At a high-level, I am just updating about 900k 
records in the database with new information, and during that update timetable, 
I didn't want users to get inconsistent data.

I read about the MVCC and discovered that I didn't necessarily need the LOCK 
statement.  However, based on what I read, I thought that versions of the 
database would include changes to the schema.  I found that not to be the case. 
 I.e. when I queried the database while a transaction was in the process of 
DROPing tables, it gave me an error instead of an older snapshot.  Is there any 
database which actually isolates schema changes?  I was just curious.

I have verified that while I'm DELETING rows from one session, that other 
sessions can retrieve the old data in a consistent state.  Although, in order 
to actually successfully DELETE the items, I had to add an index for all my 
Foreign Key fields.

Tina

From: Dave Cramer <p...@fastcrypt.com>
To: Eileen <hey_h...@yahoo.com> 
Cc: "pgsql-performance@postgresql.org" <pgsql-performance@postgresql.org> 
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2012 6:50 AM
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] JDBC 5 million function insert returning Single 
Transaction Lock Access Exclusive Problem

Dave Cramer

dave.cramer(at)credativ(dot)ca
http://www.credativ.ca


On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 2:34 AM, Eileen <hey_h...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have written some Java code which builds a postgresql function.  That
> function calls approximately 6 INSERT statements with a RETURNING clause.  I
> recreate and re-run the function about 900,000 times.  I use JDBC to execute
> these functions on postgresql 8.3 on Windows.  When I tried running this on
> a single Connection of Postgresql, it failed (some kind of memory error).
> So I split the JDBC connections up into chunks of 5000.  I reran and
> everything was fine.  It took about 1 hour to execute all the updates.


>
> Since it took so long to perform the update, I wanted to prevent other users
> from querying the data during that time.  So I read about the LOCK command.
> It seemed like I should LOCK all the tables in the database with an ACCESS
> EXCLUSIVE mode.  That would prevent anyone from getting data while the
> database was making its updates.

Do you understand how MVCC works? Do you really need to lock out users ?
>
> Since a LOCK is only valid for 1 transaction, I set autocommit to FALSE.  I
> also removed the code which chunked up the inserts.  I had read that a
> single transaction ought to have better performance than committing after
> each insert, but that was clearly not what ended up happening in my case.

We would need more information as to what you are doing.
>
> In my case, a few problems occurred.  Number 1, the process ran at least 8
> hours and never finished.  It did not finish because the hard drive was
> filled up.  After running a manual vacuum (VACUUM FULL), no space was freed
> up.  I think this has cost me 20 GB of space.  Is there any way to free this
> space up?  I even dropped the database to no avail.
>
> Secondly, why did this process take over 8 hours to run?  While reading the
> performance mailing list, it seems like recommendations are to run lots of
> INSERTS in a single commit.  Is 5 million too many?  Is redefining a
> function over and over inside a transaction a problem?  Does the RETURNING
> clause present a problem during a single transaction?

VACUUM FULL on 8.3 is not a good idea
>
> If anyone has any suggestions for me, I would really appreciate it.
>

Can you explain at a high level what you are trying to do ?

> Tina


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