SQL Transactions
SQL Transactions
A transaction is a unit of work that is performed against a database. Transactions are units or
sequences of work accomplished in a logical order, whether in a manual fashion by a user or
automatically by some sort of a database program.
A transaction is the propagation of one or more changes to the database. For example, if you are
creating a record or updating a record or deleting a record from the table, then you are
performing transaction on the table. It is important to control transactions to ensure data integrity
and to handle database errors.
Practically, you will club many SQL queries into a group and you will execute all of them together
as a part of a transaction.
Properties of Transactions:
Transactions have the following four standard properties, usually referred to by the acronym ACID:
Atomicity: ensures that all operations within the work unit are completed successfully;
otherwise, the transaction is aborted at the point of failure, and previous operations are
rolled back to their former state.
Consistency: ensures that the database properly changes states upon a successfully
committed transaction.
Durability: ensures that the result or effect of a committed transaction persists in case of a
system failure.
Transaction Control:
There are following commands used to control transactions:
Transactional control commands are only used with the DML commands INSERT, UPDATE and
DELETE only. They can not be used while creating tables or dropping them because these
operations are automatically commited in the database.
The COMMIT command saves all transactions to the database since the last COMMIT or ROLLBACK
command.
COMMIT;
Example:
Consider the CUSTOMERS table having the following records:
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| ID | NAME | AGE | ADDRESS | SALARY |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| 1 | Ramesh | 32 | Ahmedabad | 2000.00 |
| 2 | Khilan | 25 | Delhi | 1500.00 |
| 3 | kaushik | 23 | Kota | 2000.00 |
| 4 | Chaitali | 25 | Mumbai | 6500.00 |
| 5 | Hardik | 27 | Bhopal | 8500.00 |
| 6 | Komal | 22 | MP | 4500.00 |
| 7 | Muffy | 24 | Indore | 10000.00 |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
Following is the example which would delete records from the table having age = 25 and then
COMMIT the changes in the database.
As a result, two rows from the table would be deleted and SELECT statement would produce the
following result:
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| ID | NAME | AGE | ADDRESS | SALARY |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| 1 | Ramesh | 32 | Ahmedabad | 2000.00 |
| 3 | kaushik | 23 | Kota | 2000.00 |
| 5 | Hardik | 27 | Bhopal | 8500.00 |
| 6 | Komal | 22 | MP | 4500.00 |
| 7 | Muffy | 24 | Indore | 10000.00 |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
The ROLLBACK command can only be used to undo transactions since the last COMMIT or
ROLLBACK command was issued.
ROLLBACK;
Example:
Consider the CUSTOMERS table having the following records:
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| ID | NAME | AGE | ADDRESS | SALARY |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| 1 | Ramesh | 32 | Ahmedabad | 2000.00 |
| 2 | Khilan | 25 | Delhi | 1500.00 |
| 3 | kaushik | 23 | Kota | 2000.00 |
| 4 | Chaitali | 25 | Mumbai | 6500.00 |
| 5 | Hardik | 27 | Bhopal | 8500.00 |
| 6 | Komal | 22 | MP | 4500.00 |
| 7 | Muffy | 24 | Indore | 10000.00 |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
Following is the example, which would delete records from the table having age = 25 and then
ROLLBACK the changes in the database.
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| ID | NAME | AGE | ADDRESS | SALARY |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| 1 | Ramesh | 32 | Ahmedabad | 2000.00 |
| 2 | Khilan | 25 | Delhi | 1500.00 |
| 3 | kaushik | 23 | Kota | 2000.00 |
| 4 | Chaitali | 25 | Mumbai | 6500.00 |
| 5 | Hardik | 27 | Bhopal | 8500.00 |
| 6 | Komal | 22 | MP | 4500.00 |
| 7 | Muffy | 24 | Indore | 10000.00 |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
SAVEPOINT SAVEPOINT_NAME;
This command serves only in the creation of a SAVEPOINT among transactional statements. The
ROLLBACK command is used to undo a group of transactions.
ROLLBACK TO SAVEPOINT_NAME;
Following is an example where you plan to delete the three different records from the CUSTOMERS
table. You want to create a SAVEPOINT before each delete, so that you can ROLLBACK to any
SAVEPOINT at any time to return the appropriate data to its original state:
Example:
Consider the CUSTOMERS table having the following records:
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| ID | NAME | AGE | ADDRESS | SALARY |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| 1 | Ramesh | 32 | Ahmedabad | 2000.00 |
| 2 | Khilan | 25 | Delhi | 1500.00 |
| 3 | kaushik | 23 | Kota | 2000.00 |
| 4 | Chaitali | 25 | Mumbai | 6500.00 |
| 5 | Hardik | 27 | Bhopal | 8500.00 |
| 6 | Komal | 22 | MP | 4500.00 |
| 7 | Muffy | 24 | Indore | 10000.00 |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
Now that the three deletions have taken place, say you have changed your mind and decided to
ROLLBACK to the SAVEPOINT that you identified as SP2. Because SP2 was created after the first
deletion, the last two deletions are undone:
Notice that only the first deletion took place since you rolled back to SP2:
Once a SAVEPOINT has been released, you can no longer use the ROLLBACK command to undo
transactions performed since the SAVEPOINT.
For example, you can specify a transaction to be read only, or read write.