I have not kept up with PostgreSQL changes and have just been using it. A co-worker recently told me that you need to word "CONCURRENTLY" in "CREATE INDEX" to avoid table locking. I called BS on this because to my knowledge PostgreSQL does not lock tables. I referenced this page in the documentation:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/locking-indexes.html However, I do see this sentence in the indexing page that was not in the docs prior to 8.0: "Creating an index can interfere with regular operation of a database. Normally PostgreSQL locks the table to be indexed against writes and performs the entire index build with a single scan of the table." Is this true? When/why the change? When we use "concurrently," it seems to hang. I am looking into it.
