As Scott mentioned, kill -9 on a Postgres process is not a wise idea on a Postgres process.

If you query is coming from another application, then terminating that application with a kill -9 *may* work, but is, as scott says, a last resort

I tend to use kill -TERM (15) to disconnect the client, which gives the log message " terminating connection due to administrator command"
kill -INT (2) gives the "cancelling statement due to user request" and does not disconnect the client.

So it depends on what you want to do.

If i have a runaway query (not so common on 9.1 now), Then i'll try the above, and if they don't work, then i'll try an /etc/init.d/postgresql stop or a pg_ctl stop -m f. then restart the server.

Only if that does not work will i consider killing using a -9.

Cheers

pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org wrote on 19/07/2012 17:25:57:

> From: younus <younus.essahli@gmail.com>
> To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org,
> Date: 19/07/2012 20:30
> Subject: Re: [GENERAL] How to stop a query
> Sent by: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org
>
> Hi,
>
> Yes, I'm sure, it's work.
>
> if you execute query by another program (program java), you must use the
> first solution [ps -ef | grep postgres and  kill -9 (PID of your query)].
>
> if you use pgsql terminal and you're connecting with postgres you can use
> select procpid, datname, usename, client_addr,  current_query from
> pg_stat_activity where current_query!='<IDLE>';
> SELECT pg_cancel_backend (procpid);
>
>
>
>
> Younus.
>
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> View this message in context: http://postgresql.
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> Sent from the PostgreSQL - general mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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