Killing a specific session
Sometimes, the only way to let the system continue as a whole is by surgically terminating some offending database sessions. Yes, you read it right—surgically. You might indeed be tempted to reboot the server, but you should think of that as a last resort in a business continuity scenario.
In this recipe, you will be learning how to intervene, from gracefully canceling a query to brutally killing the actual process from the command line.
How to do it…
You can either run this function as a superuser or, when using PostgreSQL 9.2 or newer versions, with the same user as that of the offending backend (look for the usename field in the pg_stat_activity view).
Once you have figured out the backend you need to kill, use the function ...
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