Cookbook recipe

Serialization failures and retry logic

Applies to PostgreSQL 13–17 Last reviewed May 2026 Grounded in source

What This Is

A production experience capsule based on real incident patterns.

Why It Matters

Builds production judgment under pressure.

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Estimated investigation4 min

Scenario

Under SERIALIZABLE (or REPEATABLE READ) transactions fail with "could not serialize access". This is expected — handle it with retries. Diagnose it Identify the SQLSTATE so you can catch it: -- 40001 serialization_failure -- 40P01 deadlock_detected…

Investigation Path

Under SERIALIZABLE (or REPEATABLE READ) transactions fail with “could not serialize access”. This is expected — handle it with retries.

Diagnose it

Identify the SQLSTATE so you can catch it:

-- 40001 serialization_failure
-- 40P01 deadlock_detected
-- both are safe to retry

Why it happens

Serializable Snapshot Isolation detects when concurrent transactions would produce a non-serializable result and aborts one. It guarantees correctness without locking everything, at the cost of occasional retries.

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Related & next steps

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Concepts on this page

Isolation level Transaction
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