I have a stand-alone script that reads/writes from/to Postgre using Django ORM.
I get this error occasionally
DatabaseError: query timeout server
I have a similar need for recreating the database connection and I'm trying the following black magic to reset the connection in django 1.3:
from django.db import connection
connection.connection.close()
connection.connection = None
I don't have PostgreSQL handy to try this out, but it seems to work for MySQL and sqlite at least. Also, if you're using multi-db, you're going to have to perform this step on your specific connection from the django.db.connections dictionary.