Re: Two features left

Jon Swinth wrote:
> Maybe what you are talking about will not help.  The question is are you
> trying to make nested transactions or savepoints?
>
> Nested transactions would be useful for trying to interrupt a transaction and
> have another action happen or not happen on it's own.  An example would be
> when you want a credit card transaction to generate a log reguardless of
> whether the out transaction is commited or rolled back.  The problem with

Not with my implementation:

> >     BEGIN;
> >     SELECT ...
> >     BEGIN;
> >     UPDATE ...
> >     ABORT;
> >     DELETE ...
> >     COMMIT;

In the above case, the ABORT cancels the UPDATE.  If the outer
transaction ABORTS, everything aborts.  Even if you commit a
subtransaction, _all_ transactions above it must commit for the
subtransaction to actually commit.

If you want a log entry regardless of the transaction, put it in a
separate transaction.

> nested transactions is that it is easy to generate deadlocks, especially with
> the write locks currently on foreign keys.

Again, it isn't really any different from a transaction without
subtransactions except certain parts of the entire transaction can be
aborted.

> What may help is the concept of savepoint (if implemented internally).
> Savepoints are usually named and allow rollback to a specific point in the
> transaction.  There is no issue with deadlock since everything is still in
> the same transaction.  You then don't have to have something call ABORT, you
> simple need to say ROLLBACK TO <savepoint_name>.
>
> BEGIN;
> SELECT...
> INSERT...
> SAVEPOINT a ;
> UPDATE...
> ROLLBACK TO a ;
> DELETE...
> COMMIT;

Right.  It is no change in functionality to add savepoints because we
can just do a named BEGIN internally as the SAVEPOINT, then do ABORT
back until we match the nesting level of the savepoint.

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