Re: Suggestion: Issue warning when calling SET TRANSACTION outside transaction block

On Sat, Nov  9, 2013 at 02:15:52PM -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > [ I'm so far behind ... ]
> >
> > Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
> >> Applied.  Thank you for all your suggestions.
> >
> > I thought the suggestion had been to issue a *warning*.  How did that
> > become an error?  This patch seems likely to break applications that
> > may have just been harmlessly sloppy about when they were issuing
> > SETs and/or what flavor of SET they use.  We don't for example throw
> > an error for START TRANSACTION with an open transaction or COMMIT or
> > ROLLBACK without one --- how can it possibly be argued that these
> > operations are more dangerous than those cases?
> >
> > I'd personally have voted for using NOTICE.
> 
> Well, LOCK TABLE throws an error, so it's not without precedent.

Yeah, I just copied the LOCK TABLE usage.  You could argue that SET
SESSION ISOLATION only affects later commands and doesn't do something
like LOCK, so it should be a warning.  Not sure how to interpret the
COMMIT/ROLLBACK behavior you mentioned.

Considering we are doing this outside of a transaction, and WARNING or
ERROR is pretty much the same, from a behavioral perspective.

Should we change this and LOCK to be a warning?

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + Everyone has their own god. +