The idea is that a transaction starts when a request starts, and it’s automatically rolled back if there’s an exception. This is behavior you want from the start! It’s half (err, ¼) the point of using a database.
I mostly agreed with the rest of the article but this strikes me as massive blooper. I can see no reason this would be considered good advise.
It's the database equivalent of the GIL, can't figure out what you actually need to lock? Just lock everything!
An example of this going wrong in production, I work in the online gaming (gambling) industry. One of our users won a large jackpot, our code started a transaction, contacted the 3rd party to have them release the funds, recorded the win in the transaction journal, updated the customers balance etc. Then the stored procedure which inserted a row into the outgoing email queue had a small error. This caused all of the database work on our end to rollback.
For what its worth, this was discovered during a reconciliation with the 3rd party and the customer received his winnings.
My point being, this is a horrible way of dealing with database transactions. Only things which are transactional by nature should be carried out within the same transaction. Obviously your code needs to deal with any errors and carry on or report an error as is appropriate.
It's the database equivalent of the GIL, can't figure out what you actually need to lock? Just lock everything!
An example of this going wrong in production, I work in the online gaming (gambling) industry. One of our users won a large jackpot, our code started a transaction, contacted the 3rd party to have them release the funds, recorded the win in the transaction journal, updated the customers balance etc. Then the stored procedure which inserted a row into the outgoing email queue had a small error. This caused all of the database work on our end to rollback.
For what its worth, this was discovered during a reconciliation with the 3rd party and the customer received his winnings.
My point being, this is a horrible way of dealing with database transactions. Only things which are transactional by nature should be carried out within the same transaction. Obviously your code needs to deal with any errors and carry on or report an error as is appropriate.