Re: transaction error handling

On 11/30/2011 09:19 PM, Nicholson, Brad (Toronto, ON, CA) wrote:
> This functionality is something that Postgres can do today. We expose
> the ability to do this with explicit savepoints. The difference is
> that Oracle allows you to set it on a per transaction basis (I
> believe) and it will behave this way for all statements in the
> transaction, where as we need to do it explicitly. Looking through the
> archives there does seem to be a performance problem on commit in
> Postgres if you issue a lot of savepoints (there were discussions of a
> fix but I am not sure the status of this).
Savepoint performance has had several improvements over time. Back in
8.1 when I got started developing against Pg seriously I was having
*MASSIVE* performance issues with PL/PgSQL exception blocks (which use
savepoints) in loops; these days it's perfect.

To make automatic savepoints viable, Pg would need to be able to
completely forget a savepoint once it's been released, so there's no
ongoing cost. That way a transaction would only need two savepoints at
any particular point in time. My understanding is that it's not there
yet; AFAIK released savepoints still have a non-trivial cost that would
add up if someone was using automatic savepoints in (say) a 10,000
INSERT transaction.

--
Craig Ringer