On lör, 2011-01-01 at 13:17 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> ALTER RENAME and ALTER SET SCHEMA are both in the nature of changing the
> object's identity. Consider the fairly typical use-case where you are
> renaming an "old" instance out of the way and renaming another one into
> the same schema/name. Do you really want that to be a low-lock
> operation? I find it really hard to envision a use case where it'd be
> smart to allow some concurrent operations to continue using the the old
> instance while others start using the new one.
At least in Unix land, that's a handy property. And we're frequently
cursing those other operating systems where it doesn't work that way.