On Dec 5, 2006, at 11:04 PM, Joost Kraaijeveld wrote:
Does PostgreSQL lock the entire row in a table if I update only 1 column?
Know that updating 1 column is actually updating the whole row. So if one transaction updates column A of a row, it will block another concurrent transaction that tries to update column B of the same row. As was mentioned however, neither of these transactions block others reading the row in question, though they see the row as it existed before the updates until those update transactions commit.
If you know that your application will suffer excessive update contention trying to update different columns of the same row, you could consider splitting the columns into separate tables. This is an optimization to favor write contention over read performance (since you would likely need to join the tables when selecting) and I wouldn't do it speculatively. I'd only do it if profiling the application demonstrated significantly better performance with two tables.
-Casey
