Many people know that explicit table locks with LOCK TABLE are bad style and usually a consequence of bad design. The main reason is that they hamper concurrency and hence performance. Through a recent support case I learned that there are even worse effects of explicit table locks. Table locks Before an SQL statement […]

Prepared transactions are disabled in PostgreSQL by default, since the parameter max_prepared_transactions has the default value 0. You don’t need prepared transactions in most cases. However, they can cause nasty problems, so I think that everybody who runs a PostgreSQL database should understand them. To illustrate these problems, I’ll show you how to use prepared […]

  xmax is a PostgreSQL system column that is used to implement Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC). The documentation is somewhat terse: The identity (transaction ID) of the deleting transaction, or zero for an undeleted row version. It is possible for this column to be nonzero in a visible row version. That usually indicates that the […]