Shouldn't "aborted transaction" be an ERROR? (was Re: [NOVICE] Optimising inside transactions)

John Taylor <postgres(at)jtresponse(dot)co(dot)uk> writes:
> On Wednesday 12 June 2002 16:36, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Queries after the failure aren't run at all; they're only passed through
>> the parser's grammar so it can look for a COMMIT or ROLLBACK command.
>> Normal processing resumes after ROLLBACK. If you were paying attention
>> to the return codes you'd notice complaints like
>>
>> regression=# begin;
>> BEGIN
>> regression=# select 1/0;
>> ERROR: floating point exception! The last floating point operation either exceeded legal ranges or was a divide by zero
>> -- subsequent queries will be rejected like so:
>> regression=# select 1/0;
>> WARNING: current transaction is aborted, queries ignored until end of transaction block
>> *ABORT STATE*

> Well, I'm using JDBC, and it isn't throwing any exceptions, so I
> assumed it was working :-/

This brings up a point that's bothered me in the past. Why is the
"queries ignored" response treated as a NOTICE and not an ERROR?
A client that is not paying close attention to the command result code
(as JDBC is evidently not doing :-() might think that its command had
been executed.

It seems to me the right behavior is

regression=# select 1/0;
ERROR: current transaction is aborted, queries ignored until end of transaction block
regression=#

I think the reason why it's been done with a NOTICE is that if we
elog(ERROR) on the first command of a query string, we'll not be able to
process a ROLLBACK appearing later in the same string --- but that
behavior does not seem nearly as helpful as throwing an error.

regards, tom lane