David, > Once per quarter, we need to load a lot of data, which causes many > updates across the database. We have an online transaction > processing-style application, which we really want to stay up during the > update job. What you're talking about is "autonomous transactions". There's someone working on them for 8.4, and we may get them next version, but you can't have them now. However, you can write your stored procedures in an external language (like PL/Perl, PL/Ruby, PL/Java or PL/Python) and re-connect to your database in order to run several separate transactions. Several users are doing this for large ETL jobs. -- --Josh Josh Berkus PostgreSQL @ Sun San Francisco ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
