How to detect query which holds the lock in Postgres?

Question

I want to track mutual locks in postgres constantly.

I came across Locks Monitoring article and tried to run the following query:

SELECT bl.pid     A         


        

Answer 1

Postgres has a very rich system catalog exposed via SQL tables. PG's statistics collector is a subsystem that supports collection and reporting of information about server activity.

Now to figure out the blocking PIDs you can simply query pg_stat_activity.

select pg_blocking_pids(pid) as blocked_by
from pg_stat_activity
where cardinality(pg_blocking_pids(pid)) > 0;

To, get the query corresponding to the blocking PID, you can self-join or use it as a where clause in a subquery.

SELECT query
FROM pg_stat_activity
WHERE pid IN (select unnest(pg_blocking_pids(pid)) as blocked_by from pg_stat_activity where cardinality(pg_blocking_pids(pid)) > 0);

Note: Since pg_blocking_pids(pid) returns an Integer[], so you need to unnest it before you use it in a WHERE pid IN clause.

Hunting for slow queries can be tedious sometimes, so have patience. Happy hunting.