Re: BEGIN inside transaction should be an error

Tom Lane skrev:
> The SQL99 spec does say (in describing START TRANSACTION,
> which is the standard spelling of BEGIN)
>
>          1) If a <start transaction statement> statement is executed when an
>             SQL-transaction is currently active, then an exception condition
>             is raised: invalid transaction state - active SQL-transaction.
>
> *However*, they are almost certainly expecting that that condition only
> causes the START command to be ignored; not that it should bounce the
> whole transaction.

What is the definition of an "exception condition"?

I thought that it ment that a transaction should fail and that 
"completion condition" are
used for warnings that doesn't abort transactions. As an example I 
looked up division
by zero in sql99 and it say this:
 "If the value of a divisor is zero, then an exception condition  is raised: data exception - division by zero."

Do you mean that some exception conditions fail transactions and some 
doesn't?

/Dennis