But If you do keep the drop index inside the transaction, then you would probably be better off using truncate rather than delete, and rebuild the index non-concurrently and move that inside the transaction as well.
Hmm.... From the 9.2 manual it seems that might not work out so well:
TRUNCATE is not MVCC-safe (see Chapter 13 for general information about MVCC). After truncation, the table will appear empty to all concurrent transactions, even if they are using a snapshot taken before the truncation occurred.
It looks like other transactions could find an empty table while it was being reloaded under that approach.
