Hi. The user in question is using psycopg2, which he uses psycopg2: > import psycopg2 > conn = psycopg2.connect("dbname=%s user=%s host=%s password=%s port=%s" ...) > pg_cursor = conn.cursor() > pg_cursor.execute(<select string>) > rows = pg_cursor.fetchall() Note that (1) he said that he does not set an isolation level, and (2) he does not close the database connection after the fetchall - instead he has a Python sleep command, so he is checking the database every 60 s to see whether new entries have been added to a given table. (His code is part of the analysis pipeline - we process the image data and load it into the database, and other groups fetch the data from the database and do some analyses.) Yes, it is the case that the user's process shows up in ps aux as "idle in transaction". What would you recommend in this case? Should the user set the isolation_level for psycopg, and if so to what? Is there any Postgres configuration parameter that I should set? Should the user close the database connection after every fetchall? Thank you for any help you can give. Janet Marcin Stępnicki wrote > On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Janet Jacobsen<jsjacobsen@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > >> I assume that killing the user's process released the lock on the >> table. This user has only SELECT privileges. Under what >> conditions would a SELECT lock a table. The user connects >> to the database via a (Python?) script that runs on another >> machine. Would this way of connecting to the database result >> in a lock? >> > > Was this process 'idle in transaction' perhaps? Does this Python > script use any ORM, like SQLAlchemy? If not, which library does it use > to connect? If it's psycopg2, which isolation level (autocommit, read > committed, serializable) is set? > > Regards, > Marcin > > -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance