JDBC 5 million function insert returning Single Transaction Lock Access Exclusive Problem

Hi,

I have written some Java code which builds a postgresql function.  That function calls approximately 6 INSERT statements with a RETURNING clause.  I recreate and re-run the function about 900,000 times.  I use JDBC to execute these functions on postgresql 8.3 on Windows.  When I tried running this on a single Connection of Postgresql, it failed (some kind of memory error).  So I split the JDBC connections up into chunks of 5000.  I reran and everything was fine.  It took about 1 hour to execute all the updates.

Since it took so long to perform the update, I wanted to prevent other users from querying the data during that time.  So I read about the LOCK command.  It seemed like I should LOCK all the tables in the database with an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE mode.  That would prevent anyone from getting data while the database was making its updates.

Since a LOCK is only valid for 1 transaction, I set autocommit to FALSE.  I also removed the code which chunked up the inserts.  I had read that a single transaction ought to have better performance than committing after each insert, but that was clearly not what ended up happening in my case.

In my case, a few problems occurred.  Number 1, the process ran at least 8 hours and never finished.  It did not finish because the hard drive was filled up.  After running a manual vacuum (VACUUM FULL), no space was freed up.  I think this has cost me 20 GB of space.  Is there any way to free this space up?  I even dropped the database to no avail.

Secondly, why did this process take over 8 hours to run?  While reading the performance mailing list, it seems like recommendations are to run lots of INSERTS in a single commit.  Is 5 million too many?  Is redefining a function over and over inside a transaction a problem?  Does the RETURNING clause present a problem during a single transaction?

If anyone has any suggestions for me, I would really appreciate it.

Tina