"David Esposito" <dvesposito@newnetco.com> writes:
> So, here's the million dollar question ... and one that may or may not be a
> postgres question ... I normally have a pool of connections connected to
> postgres from my application server (jboss) ... they are all normally in the
> "idle in transaction" state (if i do a ps -ax, they are all listed as "idle
> in transaction") ... the question is, are these other connections actually
> holding open a transaction that would prevent the table from being properly
> vacuumed?
Yes. If the ps status display says it's in a transaction, then it is.
> if so, is there anything that i can do about it ... (yes, i
> suppose i need to figure out why the JDBC connections have transactions
> started before they're actually needed) ...
Darn if I know. You might try asking pgsql-jdbc list.
> and was this the case with postgres 7.1.3?
VACUUM has always acted that way, as far back as I've been involved.
regards, tom lane