Thanks for the prompt replies! It sounds like these are variations of the same approach. In our case, we need to do a lot of comparing against the old data, audit tables and so forth, so the bulk of the work is in the body of the existing loop (already coded). So I think keeping that loop body in a stand-alone stored procedure will be the most efficient for us. And we'll port the logic outside the loop into a java program, easier for us to schedule through another existing system. Those autonomous transactions are gonna be nice, but PostgreSQL is plenty nice as it is. Progress is good, though. Thanks, David Crane -----Original Message----- From: Ow Mun Heng [mailto:Ow.Mun.Heng@xxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 8:31 PM To: josh@xxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx; David Crane Subject: Re: Avoid long-running transactions in a long-runningstored procedure? On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 17:29 -0800, Josh Berkus wrote: > 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. > 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. > I actually do it externally via a perl script even, and I'm breaking the data down to even more than miniscule size. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
