Re: adding foreign key constraint locks up table

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 2:08 AM, kakarukeys <kakarukeys(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> I have a table "aaa" which is not very big. It has less than 10'000
> rows. However read operations on this table is very frequent.
>
> Whenever I try to create a new table "bbb" with foreign key pointing
> to "aaa". The operation locks, and reading "aaa" is not possible. The
> query also never seems to finish.
>
> ALTER TABLE "bbb" ADD CONSTRAINT "topic_id_refs_id_3942a46c6ab2c0b4"
> FOREIGN KEY ("topic_id") REFERENCES "aaa" ("id") DEFERRABLE INITIALLY
> DEFERRED;
>
> The current workaround is to create any new table at off-peak hours,
> e.g. midnight after restarting the db.
>
> I would like to know if there's any proper solution of this. Is this
> an issue affecting all relational databases? My db is PostgreSQL 8.3.
>
>
how many rows does "bbb" have? And what are the data types of column
aaa.idand bbb.topic_id?

Creating a foreign key should not lock out aaa against reads. Can you
provide the output of the following:

select relname, oid from pg_class where relname in ( 'aaa', 'bbb' );

select * from pg_locks; -- run this from a new session when you think "aaa"
is locked by foreign key creation.

Regards,
--
gurjeet.singh
@ EnterpriseDB - The Enterprise Postgres Company
http://www.EnterpriseDB.com

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