Idle in transaction

Hello, Database: postgresql 10

Yesterday I noticed, DBeaver leaves its internal queries in “idle in transaction” state. In this particular case those queries lasts for hours (until spotted by maintenance guys).

Here are queries mentioned queries:

SELECT e.typdelim FROM pg_catalog.pg_type t, pg_catalog.pg_type e WHERE t.oid = $1 and t.typelem = e.oid

SHOW search_path

Yesterday I was able to reproduce this issue using my home computer and DBeaver running on Windows10. It was caused by selecting database from Navigator, and clicking CTRL+] to open new tab connected to selected DB.

Unfortunately today I’m not able to reproduce it using Dbeaver running on Ubuntu (in both cases most recent version 7.0.1)

I’m going to check it at home again.

Anyway this is something which should not happen ever. So it’s very important to fix it.

[michalk-k]

I cannot decide about this too since I’m not the author of this application. The crucial message is: leaving session in idle in transaction state is considered unacceptable. A lot of properly configured systems is configured to kill such hanging connections after some short period of time. I’m not sure it does any good to DBeaver and user experience though.

I have two ideas:

1. force separate connection for metadata if no auto-commit enabled
2. the same as #1 but only if there is no opened transaction by a user.
3. otherwise warn client that it will commit his transaction.

The point is that in current state, DBeaver opens transaction for meta data (so in the background) and leaves it opened even if no transaction has been opened by a user. The user cannot expect to commit something which is not opened by him.

with regards

[da-]

+1 this is a dangerous situation; I’ve had to apologize to our production team because my “Idle in transaction” process stalled a nightly import operation.

Ironically, because I wanted the protection of manually committing update transactions.

I like @michalk-k 's suggestions for fixes. And this is exactly correct: “The user cannot expect to commit something which is not opened by him.”

How about:

• If the user turns off auto-commit, warn the user we’re automatically turning on “separate connection for metadata read” to prevent long-lived idle transactions.
• And if the user turns off “separate connection for metadata read”, warn them we’re automatically turning on auto-commit.