Wizard Brony <wizardbrony@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > But in my testing, I find that according to that statement, the transaction start time is actually "the start of the first non-transaction-control statement in the transaction" (as mentioned earlier in the section). Is my conclusion correct, or am I misunderstanding the documentation? It's even looser than that, really: it's the first statement that requires an MVCC snapshot. From memory, LOCK TABLE is an important exception --- you can acquire table locks before pinning down a snapshot, and this is important in some scenarios. regards, tom lane