Thank you! That worked perfectly. I didn't know that I needed to put
in the BEGIN/END transaction stuff, but of course that makes sense.
I tried it by having two process, and sure enough, process #2 blocked
until the END was issued on process #1. And I can rely on this being
absolutely true, right? No amount of load or clever timing will make
this condition not be true?
Thanks for the help. I can say that Postgres has _way_ better support
than any kind of Microsoft product. 7.1 should be awesome. Free
software these days just rocks.