To the best of my knowledge, normal SELECTs should continue to work and
should be able to see the data as it appeard before your "locking" process
made any changes.
Oracle has the syntax SELECT... FOR UPDATE NOWAIT to do what you want
(except it doesn't tell you who has the lock). Perhaps Postgres needs
something similar?
At 01:04 PM 7/14/99 +0100, you wrote:
>I am using Postgres 6.5 on Linux through the libpq interface
>
>I have a situation where an existing record can be opened by one user,
>updated or rolled back. While the first user has the record I need to make
>sure no other user can open it. I use
>
>SELECT .... FOR UPDATE
>
>This works but the second process blocks (looking to the user like a hung
>program), until the first process releases the record. Since updating a
>record can take some time the blocking could be there for some time.
>
>I would like the second SELECT .... FOR UPDATE to fail with an error I can
>catch telling me of a conflict (and hopefully which process has the lock),
>allowing me to backout gracefully with a consolatory message to the user. I
>would like normal SELECTs (without FOR UPDATE) to work an normal.
>
>I think that this is an option in pg_options but I'm not sure. I have looked
>in the source (lock.c and lmgr.c) to try and figure out what to do. I found
>something called "user locks" which looks promising but I'm still not sure.
>
>Help !
>
>Trevor
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