Transactions management

Psycopg has a behaviour that may seem surprising compared to psql: by default, any database operation will start a new transaction. As a consequence, changes made by any cursor of the connection will not be visible until Connection.commit() is called, and will be discarded by Connection.rollback(). The following operation on the same connection will start a new transaction.

If a database operation fails, the server will refuse further commands, until a rollback() is called.

If the cursor is closed with a transaction open, no COMMIT command is sent to the server, which will then discard the connection. Certain middleware (such as PgBouncer) will also discard a connection left in transaction state, so, if possible you will want to commit or rollback a connection before finishing working with it.

An example of what will happen, the first time you will use Psycopg (and to be disappointed by it), is likely:

conn = psycopg.connect()

# Creating a cursor doesn't start a transaction or affect the connection
# in any way.
cur = conn.cursor()

cur.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM my_table")
# This function call executes:
# - BEGIN
# - SELECT count(*) FROM my_table
# So now a transaction has started.

# If your program spends a long time in this state, the server will keep
# a connection "idle in transaction", which is likely something undesired

cur.execute("INSERT INTO data VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))
# This statement is executed inside the transaction

conn.close()
# No COMMIT was sent: the INSERT was discarded.

There are a few things going wrong here, let’s see how they can be improved.

One obvious problem after the run above is that, firing up psql, you will see no new record in the table data. One way to fix the problem is to call conn.commit() before closing the connection. Thankfully, if you use the connection context, Psycopg will commit the connection at the end of the block (or roll it back if the block is exited with an exception):

The code modified using a connection context will result in the following sequence of database statements:

with psycopg.connect() as conn:

    cur = conn.cursor()

    cur.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM my_table")
    # This function call executes:
    # - BEGIN
    # - SELECT count(*) FROM my_table
    # So now a transaction has started.

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO data VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))
    # This statement is executed inside the transaction

# No exception at the end of the block:
# COMMIT is executed.

This way we don’t have to remember to call neither close() nor commit() and the database operations actually have a persistent effect. The code might still do something you don’t expect: keep a transaction from the first operation to the connection closure. You can have a finer control over the transactions using an autocommit transaction and/or transaction contexts.

Warning

By default even a simple SELECT will start a transaction: in long-running programs, if no further action is taken, the session will remain idle in transaction, an undesirable condition for several reasons (locks are held by the session, tables bloat…). For long lived scripts, either make sure to terminate a transaction as soon as possible or use an autocommit connection.

Hint

If a database operation fails with an error message such as InFailedSqlTransaction: current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block, it means that a previous operation failed and the database session is in a state of error. You need to call rollback() if you want to keep on using the same connection.

Autocommit transactions

The manual commit requirement can be suspended using autocommit, either as connection attribute or as connect() parameter. This may be required to run operations that cannot be executed inside a transaction, such as CREATE DATABASE, VACUUM, CALL on stored procedures using transaction control.

With an autocommit transaction, the above sequence of operation results in:

with psycopg.connect(autocommit=True) as conn:

    cur = conn.cursor()

    cur.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM my_table")
    # This function call now only executes:
    # - SELECT count(*) FROM my_table
    # and no transaction starts.

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO data VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))
    # The result of this statement is persisted immediately by the database

# The connection is closed at the end of the block but, because it is not
# in a transaction state, no COMMIT is executed.

An autocommit transaction behaves more as someone coming from psql would expect. This has a beneficial performance effect, because less queries are sent and less operations are performed by the database. The statements, however, are not executed in an atomic transaction; if you need to execute certain operations inside a transaction, you can achieve that with an autocommit connection too, using an explicit transaction block.

Transaction contexts

A more transparent way to make sure that transactions are finalised at the right time is to use with Connection.transaction() to create a transaction context. When the context is entered, a transaction is started; when leaving the context the transaction is committed, or it is rolled back if an exception is raised inside the block.

Continuing the example above, if you want to use an autocommit connection but still wrap selected groups of commands inside an atomic transaction, you can use a transaction() context:

with psycopg.connect(autocommit=True) as conn:

    cur = conn.cursor()

    cur.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM my_table")
    # The connection is autocommit, so no BEGIN executed.

    with conn.transaction():
        # BEGIN is executed, a transaction started

        cur.execute("INSERT INTO data VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))
        cur.execute("INSERT INTO times VALUES (now())")
        # These two operation run atomically in the same transaction

    # COMMIT is executed at the end of the block.
    # The connection is in idle state again.

# The connection is closed at the end of the block.

Note that connection blocks can also be used with non-autocommit connections: in this case you still need to pay attention to eventual transactions started automatically. If an operation starts an implicit transaction, a transaction() block will only manage a savepoint sub-transaction, leaving the caller to deal with the main transaction, as explained in Transactions management:

conn = psycopg.connect()

cur = conn.cursor()

cur.execute("SELECT count(*) FROM my_table")
# This function call executes:
# - BEGIN
# - SELECT count(*) FROM my_table
# So now a transaction has started.

with conn.transaction():
    # The block starts with a transaction already open, so it will execute
    # - SAVEPOINT

    cur.execute("INSERT INTO data VALUES (%s)", ("Hello",))

# The block was executing a sub-transaction so on exit it will only run:
# - RELEASE SAVEPOINT
# The transaction is still on.

conn.close()
# No COMMIT was sent: the INSERT was discarded.

If a transaction() block starts when no transaction is active then it will manage a proper transaction. In essence, a transaction context tries to leave a connection in the state it found it, and leaves you to deal with the wider context.

Hint

The interaction between non-autocommit transactions and transaction contexts is probably surprising. Although the non-autocommit default is what’s demanded by the DBAPI, the personal preference of several experienced developers is to:

• use a connection block: with psycopg.connect(...) as conn;

• use an autocommit connection, either passing autocommit=True as connect() parameter or setting the attribute conn.autocommit = True;

• use with conn.transaction() blocks to manage transactions only where needed.

Nested transactions

Transaction blocks can be also nested (internal transaction blocks are implemented using SAVEPOINT): an exception raised inside an inner block has a chance of being handled and not completely fail outer operations. The following is an example where a series of operations interact with the database: operations are allowed to fail; at the end we also want to store the number of operations successfully processed.

with conn.transaction() as tx1:
    num_ok = 0
    for operation in operations:
        try:
            with conn.transaction() as tx2:
                unreliable_operation(conn, operation)
        except Exception:
            logger.exception(f"{operation} failed")
        else:
            num_ok += 1

    save_number_of_successes(conn, num_ok)

If unreliable_operation() causes an error, including an operation causing a database error, all its changes will be reverted. The exception bubbles up outside the block: in the example it is intercepted by the try so that the loop can complete. The outermost block is unaffected (unless other errors happen there).

You can also write code to explicitly roll back any currently active transaction block, by raising the Rollback exception. The exception “jumps” to the end of a transaction block, rolling back its transaction but allowing the program execution to continue from there. By default the exception rolls back the innermost transaction block, but any current block can be specified as the target. In the following example, a hypothetical CancelCommand may stop the processing and cancel any operation previously performed, but not entirely committed yet.

from psycopg import Rollback

with conn.transaction() as outer_tx:
    for command in commands():
        with conn.transaction() as inner_tx:
            if isinstance(command, CancelCommand):
                raise Rollback(outer_tx)
            process_command(command)

# If `Rollback` is raised, it would propagate only up to this block,
# and the program would continue from here with no exception.

Transaction characteristics

You can set transaction parameters for the transactions that Psycopg handles. They affect the transactions started implicitly by non-autocommit transactions and the ones started explicitly by Connection.transaction() for both autocommit and non-autocommit transactions. Leaving these parameters as None will use the server’s default behaviour (which is controlled by server settings such as default_transaction_isolation).

In order to set these parameters you can use the connection attributes isolation_level, read_only, deferrable. For async connections you must use the equivalent set_isolation_level() method and similar. The parameters can only be changed if there isn’t a transaction already active on the connection.

Warning

Applications running at REPEATABLE_READ or SERIALIZABLE isolation level are exposed to serialization failures. In certain concurrent update cases, PostgreSQL will raise an exception looking like:

psycopg2.errors.SerializationFailure: could not serialize access
due to concurrent update

In this case the application must be prepared to repeat the operation that caused the exception.

Two-Phase Commit protocol support

New in version 3.1.

Psycopg exposes the two-phase commit features available in PostgreSQL implementing the two-phase commit extensions proposed by the DBAPI.

The DBAPI model of two-phase commit is inspired by the XA specification, according to which transaction IDs are formed from three components:

• a format ID (non-negative 32 bit integer)

• a global transaction ID (string not longer than 64 bytes)

• a branch qualifier (string not longer than 64 bytes)

For a particular global transaction, the first two components will be the same for all the resources. Every resource will be assigned a different branch qualifier.

According to the DBAPI specification, a transaction ID is created using the Connection.xid() method. Once you have a transaction id, a distributed transaction can be started with Connection.tpc_begin(), prepared using tpc_prepare() and completed using tpc_commit() or tpc_rollback(). Transaction IDs can also be retrieved from the database using tpc_recover() and completed using the above tpc_commit() and tpc_rollback().

PostgreSQL doesn’t follow the XA standard though, and the ID for a PostgreSQL prepared transaction can be any string up to 200 characters long. Psycopg’s Xid objects can represent both XA-style transactions IDs (such as the ones created by the xid() method) and PostgreSQL transaction IDs identified by an unparsed string.

The format in which the Xids are converted into strings passed to the database is the same employed by the PostgreSQL JDBC driver: this should allow interoperation between tools written in Python and in Java. For example a recovery tool written in Python would be able to recognize the components of transactions produced by a Java program.

For further details see the documentation for the Two-Phase Commit support methods.