Christopher > You could use a 1 column/1 row table perhaps. Use some sort of locking > mechanism. > > Also, check out contrib/userlock
userlock is definitely the way to go for this type of problem. The are really the only way to provide locking facilities that live outside transactions. You are provided with 48 bits of lock space in the form of offset/block in 32 bit field and a 16 bit field. The 16 bit field could be the pid of the locker and the 32 bit field the oid of the function. Unfortunately, userlocks are not really easy to query via the pg_locks() view. However this has been addressed for 8.1. In 8.1, it will be trivial to create a function which checked the number of lockers on the function oid and acquire a lock if less than a certain amount. Merlin ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
