I'm using PHP's mysqli library. Database inserts and updates are always in a try-catch block. Success of each query is checked immediately (if $result === false), and any failure throws an exception. The catch calls mysqli_rollback() and exits with a message for the user.
My question is, should I bother checking the return value of mysqli_rollback()? If so, and rollback fails, what actions should the code take?
I have a hard time understanding how a rollback could fail (barring some atrocious bug in MySQL). And since PHP is going to exit anyway, calling rollback almost seems superfluous. I certainly think it should be in the code for clarity, but when PHP exits it will close the connection to MySQL and uncommitted transactions are rolled back automatically.
if rollback fails (connection failure for example), the changes will be rollbacked after the connection close anyway, so you don't need to handle the error. When you are in transaction, unless you have explicit commit (or you are running in autocommit mode, which means you have commit after each statement), the transaction is being roll back.
If a session that has autocommit disabled ends without explicitly
committing the final transaction, MySQL rolls back that transaction.
The only case you would like to handle rollback error is if you are not exiting from your script, but starting a new transaction later, as starting transaction will implicitly commit the current one. Check out Statements That Cause an Implicit Commit
mysqli_rollback can fail if you're not (never were) connected to the database. Depends on your error-handling before-hand.
Related
This seems like a simple enough question, yet I couldn't find any definitive answers specific for MySQL. Look at this:
$mysqli->autocommit(false); //Start the transaction
$success = true;
/* do a bunch of inserts here, which will be rolled back and
set $success to false if they fail */
if ($success) {
if ($mysqli->commit()) {
/* display success message, possibly redirect to another page */
}
else {
/* display error message */
$mysqli->rollback(); //<----------- Do I need this?
}
}
$mysqli->autocommit(true); //Turns autocommit back on (will be turned off again if needed)
//Keep running regardless, possibly executing more inserts
The thing is, most examples I have seen just end the script if commiting failed, either by letting it finish or by explicitly calling exit(), which apparently auto rolls back the transaction(?), but what if I need to keep running and possibly execute more database-altering operations later? If this commit failed and I didn't have that rollback there, would turning autocommit back on (which according to this comment on the PHP manual's entry on autocommit does commit pending operations) or even explicitly calling another $mysqli->commit() later on, attempt to commit the previous inserts again, since it failed before and they weren't rolled back?
I hope I've been clear enough and that I can get a definitive answer for this, which has been bugging me quite a lot.
Edit: OK, maybe I phrased my question wrong in that line comment. It's not really a matter of whether or not I need the rollback, which, as it was pointed out, would depend on my use case, but really what is the effect of having or not having a rollback in that line. Perhaps a simpler question would be: does a failed commit call discards pending operations or does it just leaves them in their pending state, waiting for a rollback or another commit?
If you are NOT re-using the connection and it is closed immediately after the transaction fails, closing the connection would cause an implicit rollback anyway.
If you are re-using the connection, you should definitely do a rollback to avoid inconsistency with any follow-up statements.
And if you are not really re-using it but it is still in a blocking state (e.g. being left open for a couple of seconds or even minutes, depending e.g. whether you're on a website or a cronjob), please keep in mind that there can be many concurrent connections going on. So if you have a very large transaction, the server needs to hold it in a temporary state which might consume lots of memory (e.g. if you're doing a major database migration that affects lots of columns or tables) you should definitely do an explicit rollback or close the connection for an implicit rollback after it fails.
Another factor is => if you have lots of concurrent connections in different processes, they may or may not already see parts of the transaction, even if it's not committed yet, depending on the transaction isolation level that you are using. See also:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/innodb-transaction-isolation-levels.html
When doing 1 or more stored procedures, can you place a transaction around the procedure instead of inside of it?
$db->beginTransaction();
$db->exec("call my_procedure()");
$db->exec("call my_second_procedure()");
$db->commit();
When doing the above (pdo), does the transaction commit after both calls, or does it auto commit after each call is run making beginTransaction() and commit() useless?
Yes, you can.
As long as none of the procedures executes a COMMIT or ROLLBACK or START TRANSACTION internally, and as long as none of the procedures (or your code) executes any of the statements that cause an implicit commit, this works fine.
Autocommit is not in effect while you have a transaction running, even though SELECT ##autocommit; will still indicate "1," which is only an indication that your session is in autocommit mode when a transaction isn't active.
I would say, "it depends" :-)
first of all, if you are using MyISAM, which does not support transaction, PDO::beginTransaction() still returns true, but no transaction started.
See http://php.net/manual/en/pdo.transactions.php
I found out that postgres + PDO auto rollbacks previous changes when an exception is thrown (EVEN WHEN THE EXCEPTION IS CAUGHT AND SWALLOWED!). Example (in pseudo-code):
$transaction->begin();
try {
$manager->insert("INSERT ...");
try {
$manager->exec("A QUERY BREAKING SOME DB CONSTRAINT LIKE A UNIQUE INDEX ...");
} catch (\Exception $ex) {
// IT IS CAUGHT AND SWALLOWED!
}
$transaction->commit();
} catch (Exception $ex) {
$transaction->rollback(); // THIS CLEARLY DOES NOT RUN!
}
In postgres the first insert gets reverted. In mysql no.
Can anyone throws some light on the matter? Is it possible to change this ridiculous behaviour? I would like to perform my rollbacks myself and not get pg to do it when he thinks it is appropriate.
That's not PDO's fault, it's inherent to PostgreSQL's transaction management. See:
How can I tell PostgreSQL not to abort the whole transaction when a single constraint has failed?
Can I ask Postgresql to ignore errors within a transaction
Rollback after error in transaction
PostgreSQL doesn't roll the transaction back, but it sets it to an aborted state where it can only roll back, and where all statements except ROLLBACK report an error:
ERROR: current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block
(I'm surprised not to find this referred to in the official documentation; think I'll need to write a patch to improve that.)
So. When you try/catch and swallow the exception in PDO, you're trapping a PHP-side exception, but you're not changing the fact that the PostgreSQL transaction is in an aborted state.
If you wanted to be able to swallow exceptions and keep on using the transaction, you must create a SAVEPOINT before each statement that might fail. If it fails, you must ROLLBACK TO SAVEPOINT ...;. If it succeeds you may RELEASE SAVEPOINT ...;. This imposes extra overhead on the database for transaction management, adds round-trips, and burns through transaction IDs faster (which means PostgreSQL has to do more background cleanup work).
It is generally preferable to instead design your SQL so it won't fail under normal circumstances. For example, you can validate most constraints client-side, treating the server side constraints as a second level of assurance while trapping most errors client-side.
Where that's impractical, make your application fault tolerant, so it can retry a failed transaction. Sometimes this is necessary anyway - for example, you can't generally use savepoints to recover from deadlocks transaction aborts or serialization failures. It can also be useful to keep failure-prone transactions as short as possible, doing just the minimum work required, so you have less to keep track of and repeat.
So: Where possible, instead of swallowing an exception, run failure-prone database code in a retry loop. Make sure your code keeps a record of the information it needs to retry the whole transaction on error, not just the most recent statement.
Remember, any transaction can fail: The DBA might restart the database to apply a patch, the system might run out of RAM due to a runaway cron job, etc. So failure tolerant apps are a good design anyway.
Props to you for at least using PDO exceptions and handling exceptions - you're way ahead of most devs already.
If I run the following PHP, I would expect no value to be inserted into the test table, because I have a transaction that I haven't committed:
$db = mysql_connect("localhost","test","test");
mysql_select_db("test");
mysql_query("begin transaction;");
mysql_query("insert into Test values (1);") or die("insert error: ". mysql_errror());
die('Data should not be commited\n');
mysql_query("commit;"); // never occurs because of the die()
But instead it seems to commit anyway. Is there a way to turn off this behaviour without turning off autocommit for the PHP that doesn't use transactions elsewhere on the site?
Use mysql_query('BEGIN'). The SQL "BEGIN TRANSACTION" is not valid (and in fact mysql_query is returning false on that query, which means there is an error). It's not working because you never start a transaction.
The syntax to start a transaction is:
START TRANSACTION
The feature you are talking about is AUTOCOMMIT. If you don't want it, you'll have to disable it:
SET autocommit = 0
The reference can be found at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/commit.html
I also recommend that you test the return value of all mysql_...() functions. You cannot assume that they'll always run successfully.
By default, the transaction will not be rolled back. It is the responsibility of your application code to decide how to handle this error, whether that's trying again, or rolling back.
If you want automatic rollback, that is also explained in the manual:
The current transaction is not rolled back. To have the entire transaction roll back, start the server with the `--innodb_rollback_on_timeout` option.
I've seen an code example where someone does a
$dbh->rollback();
when there occurs an PDOException. I thought the database will rollback automatically in such a case?
If you don't commit not rollback an opened transaction, and it's not commited anywhere later in your script, it won't be commited (as seen by the database engine), and will automatically rolled-back at the end of your script.
Still, I (well, almost) always commit or rollback explicitly the transactions I open, so :
There is not risk of an error (like commiting "by mistake" later in the script)
The code is more easy to read / understand : when one sees $db->rollback(), he knows I want the transaction rolled-back for sure, and he doesn't have to think "did he really want to rollback, or did he forget something ? and what about later in the script ?"
The DB engine doesn't "see" the PDOException : it is thrown by PHP under various conditions -- but the database doesn't rollback anything by itself :
either a transaction is commited
or it's rolled-back
or it's not explicitly commited nor rolled-back -- which means it's not commited -- which means what's been modified is not "really" modified