It seems that whenever I create a new empty table with a foreign key constraint, the transaction will acquire an exclusive lock on the referenced table, locking out other writers (not sure if even readers as well), and I don't quite see why that is necessary if the new entity does not contain any rows since there is nothing to check or validate in terms of the presence of values in the referenced column. This is biting us particularly now (it took the site down for a few minutes each time for the last couple of days) because we have a number of tables, and intend to add more, that are partitioned by date, all of which reference the core "person" table, for which we make new partitions daily via cron, and there is just no way we can take the app offline each time. And we will also soon start dropping them (i.e. removing from the inheritance hierarchy, archiving the content and then dropping them) automatically on an ongoing basis to keep the core data set manageable. In fact, it even looks like the dropping also requires a lock on the referenced table which makes even less sense to me ... Am I confused, or is there a way around it? We are on 8.3.7 atm. Regards, Frank -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
