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Prefect Community

Hey guys,
How do I keep a database connection active through out an entire flow? I keep getting the pickling error when I try to share/use the database connection within tasks
```TypeError: cannot pickle '_thread.lock' object```

Right now the best way would be to use a connection pool, but in the very near future we’ll have a more first-class way of re-using connections with this PR: <https://github.com/PrefectHQ/prefect/pull/3139>

Thanks <@UKNSNMUE6> is there a way to disable the picking for certain tasks? I tried the checkpoint=False, but it doesn't work

No - Prefect supports parallelism / distributed computation in a first-class way which requires objects to be shared among processes; the only way to do that for generic python objects is via pickle (or `cloudpickle` in Prefect’s case)

<@UQYSR0HKL> I haven’t tried it, but I assume that `cloudpickle` extends standard pickle methods, and you can wrap what you don’t want to pickle in a class with <https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html#object.__setstate__|__setstate__> and <https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html#object.__getstate__|__getstate__> defined, which drop or substitute for whatever content you don’t want to pickle. You could probably define these on a Task-derived class itself to customize how it is pickled.