In my custom set up, the database server is shutdown after the dao tests have run using a script that called the postgres command "pg_ctl stop".

Initially I was using maven to call the antrun plugin to run dbunit to load the sample data. This worked fine.

After I had changed to using the maven dbunit plugin, the database stop script hung.

My conclusion is that dbunit, run from the maven plug in, is not closing its database connection.

My solutions was to use:

pg_ctl stop -m f

This will shutdown the database without waiting for all clients to disconnect, forcing a role back for any currently open transactions.