Re: Avoid long-running transactions in a long-running stored procedure? - Mailing list pgsql-performance

On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 17:29 -0800, Josh Berkus wrote:
> 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.
> 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.
>

I actually do it externally via a perl script even, and I'm breaking the
data down to even more than miniscule size.