Re: [HACKERS] please?

> A possible approach is for your clients to maintain more than one
> backend connection, and use one of the backends to do the stuff
> that might block while using another one to do the stuff that won't.
> This would take a little more bookkeeping in the client but it seems
> like a logically cleaner way to think about it.

Or you could do it outside of the database using a Unix filesystem lock
file. There are symantics for no-blocking lock stuff in flock():

#define LOCK_SH 0x01 /* shared file lock */
#define LOCK_EX 0x02 /* exclusive file lock */
#define LOCK_NB 0x04 /* don't block when locking */
#define LOCK_UN 0x08 /* unlock file */

I don't know of any SQL databases that allow non-blocking lock requests.

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