> > That is what transactions are for. If any errors occur, then the
> > transacction is aborted. You are supposed to use 
> > transactions when you want either everything to occur
> > (the whole transaction), or nothing, if an error occurs.
> 
>       Yes.  There are certainly times when a transaction needs to be
> ABORTed.  However, there are many reasons why the database should not
> abort a transaction if it does not need to.  There is obviously no
> reason why a transaction needs to be aborted for syntax errors.  There
> is obviously no reason why a transaction needs to be aborted for say,
> trying to insert a duplicate primary key.  The -insert- can 
> fail, report it as such, and the application can determine if a rollback
> is nessasary. If you don't believe me, here's two fully SQL-92 
> compliant databases, Oracle and interbase, which do not exhibit this
behavior: 

Oracle & Interbase have savepoints. Hopefully PG will also have them in 7.2

Vadim

Reply via email to