Company
Date Published
June 15, 2020
Author
Raphael 'kena' Poss
Word count
4865
Language
English
Hacker News points
100

Summary

CockroachDB 20.1 introduces support for nested transactions, a SQL feature that simplifies the work of programmers of certain client applications. Nested transactions are additional transactions that occur within a regular transaction or other nested transactions, like Russian dolls. They are invisible to concurrent clients due to the atomicity and isolation of their surrounding, "outermost" transaction. Nested transactions have been invented for the benefit of software engineers of client applications in component-based design. CockroachDB's support for nested transactions is limited in three noticeable ways: locking semantics, canceling schema changes, and recovering from serializability conflicts.