Thread: Runtime parameter holding is_in_transaction state

Hello.

Is there a runtime parameter which holds true if we are inside
transaction, and false otherwise?

By runtime parameter I mean what can be retrieved by SHOW command.

Thanks.

--
Sergey Samokhin

Sergey Samokhin <prikrutil@gmail.com> writes:
> Is there a runtime parameter which holds true if we are inside
> transaction, and false otherwise?

No, because it is not possible to execute SHOW without being inside
a transaction.

Maybe you should explain what it is you want to accomplish.

            regards, tom lane

Hello.

> Maybe you should explain what it is you want to accomplish.

Thanks for your answer, Tom! It caused me to start looking for another
solution rather than looking for such a variable.

The original purpose of asking the question was to find a way to
detect that a transaction passed to my server as one big string has
failed:

// This transaction will never succeed because there is an UPDATE of
non existing table
// To gracefully get things back I should detect the failure and do ROLLBACK
"BEGIN; UPDATE non_existing_table SET foo = 42; <skipped> ; COMMIT;"

One way to detect that would be to check if we are still in
transaction by SHOW'ing some variable. It seemed like what I should
try, because every faulty query leaves its transaction opened. In any
way, this solution is much more expensive than conventional traversing
the list of results which my driver returns for each complex query.

Now when I've chosen a way to check if such a complex query
(containing several SQL-commands) failed, I no longer want such a
parameter to exist in PG.

--
Sergey Samokhin