David,
> Once per quarter, we need to load a lot of data, which causes many
> updates across the database. We have an online transaction
> processing-style application, which we really want to stay up during the
> update job.
What you're talking about is "autonomous transactions". There's someone
working on them for 8.4, and we may get them next version, but you can't
have them now.
However, you can write your stored procedures in an external language (like
PL/Perl, PL/Ruby, PL/Java or PL/Python) and re-connect to your database in
order to run several separate transactions. Several users are doing this
for large ETL jobs.
--
--Josh
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco