The "little trick" in the Citus approach is very inventive. SHARE ROW EXCLUSIVE mode protects a table against concurrent data changes, and is self-exclusive so that only one session can hold it at a time. Thus, when such lock is obtained, we can be sure that there are no more pending transactions with uncommited changes. It's a protection from loosing data of the pending transactions. Throwing the exception immediately releases the lock. Thus, the exclusive table lock is held for milliseconds. I like the general idea, but I don't want to add plpgsql functions/procedures. I'll see if this can be elegantly implemented in Java+SQL (without plpgsql) and perhaps add it as alternative approach to my project. Such approach may be even more effective because it focuses on a single table and not on all transactions like the one described in my project, thus, locks on irrelevant tables have no effect on event handlers. Thanks for sharing.