On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 21:24 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes: > > How do other database deal with this? Either they nest BEGIN/COMMIT or > > they probably throw an error without aborting the transaction, which is > > pretty much what we do. Is there a database that actually aborts a > > whole transaction just for an extraneous begin? > > Probably not. 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. So I think the argument that this is required by > the spec is a bit off base.
If you interpret the standard that way then the correct behaviour in the face of *any* exception condition should be *not* abort the transaction. In PostgreSQL, all exception conditions do abort the transaction, so why not this one? Why would we special-case this? -- Simon Riggs EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
