"Tom Allison" <tom@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > The other approach would be to use an external file to queue these updates and > run them from a crontab. Something like: ... > and then run a job daily to read all these in to a hash (to make them unique > values) and then run one SQL statement at the end of the day. Well probably better to keep it in the database. The database also knows how to use hashes to get distinct values too. So if you have a "history" table which records ids with dates and then do a transaction like: BEGIN; DELETE FROM tokens WHERE id NOT IN (select id from history); DELETE from history WHERE seen < now()-'3 days'::interval; END; This could still deadlock so it may make sense for it to do it in a transaction and add LOCK TABLE statements to lock the tables which refer to the tokens table. -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com