Savepoints

Imagine we’re working on a complex online order. The customer adds items to their cart, then maybe applies a discount code, and finally enters their payment information. What if there’s an issue applying the discount code? We wouldn’t want to cancel the entire order and make the customer start over. Instead, it would be great if we could just undo the discount code attempt and let them proceed with the items they’ve already selected. This is precisely where savepoints in database transactions come to our rescue! They allow us to create bookmarks within a series of database operations. If something goes wrong after a bookmark, we can roll back to that specific point without losing all the work done before it. This gives us much finer control over our transactions, especially when they involve multiple steps.

By the end of this lesson, we will be able to:

• Understand the concept of savepoints and their crucial role within database transactions.

• Learn how to create a savepoint using the SAVEPOINT statement.

• Learn how to roll back a transaction to a specific savepoint using the ROLLBACK TO SAVEPOINT statement.

• Understand how to remove a savepoint using the RELEASE SAVEPOINT statement (though it’s often handled automatically).

• Recognize various scenarios where savepoints are highly beneficial for managing complex and multi-step database operations effectively.

Let’s get started and see how savepoints can make our database operations more robust and flexible!

Understanding savepoints

In database operations, a transaction is a sequence of one or more SQL statements that are executed as a single unit of work. We’ve learned about COMMIT ...