"Jim C. Nasby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 11:26:51AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: >> Such an ALTER would certainly require exclusive lock on the table, >> so I'm not sure that I see much use-case for doing it like that. >> You'd want to do the ALTER and commit so as not to lock other people >> out of the table entirely while doing the bulk data-pushing.
> Maybe this just isn't clear, but would EXCLUSIVE block writes from all > other sessions then? I don't think it should (which implies that EXCLUSIVE is a bad name). My point is that ALTER RELIABILITY would have to gain exclusive lock for long enough to change the table's reliability marking --- you have to synchronize such a change with other transactions' activity on the table, and table-level locks are the only mechanism we have for that. It's not different from a schema change such as adding a column. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings