On 2008-09-10 16:46, Jack Orenstein wrote: > Application requirement. We need to do something for each row retrieved from BIG > and the something is expensive. We do the scan slowly (30 second sleep inside > the loop) to amortize the cost. Then do the processing in separate transactions like this (in pseudocode): $last_id = -1; do { begin transaction; $result = select * from bigtable where id>$last_id and processed=false order by id limit 1; if ( empty($result) ) { rollback; break; } do_something_expensive_with($result[0]); update bigtable set processed=true where id=$result[0][id]; commit; sleep 30; } while (true); Always avoid long running transactions. This is recommended for any transactional database. Regards Tometzky -- ...although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were... Winnie the Pooh