MySQL FAQs - Transaction Management

A collection of 24 FAQs on MySQL transaction management. Clear answers are provided with tutorial exercises on starting and ending transactions; committing and rolling back transactions; transaction isolation levels: read committed and repeatable read; locks and dead locks. Topics included in this FAQ are:

1. What Is a Transaction?
2. How To Start a New Transaction?
3. How To End the Current Transaction?
4. How To Create a Table for Transaction Testing?
5. How To Switch between Autocommit-On and Autocommit-Off Modes?
6. How To Find Out the Current Transaction Mode?
7. How To Start a New Transaction Explicitly?
8. How To Commit the Current Transaction?
9. How To Rollback the Current Transaction?
10. What Happens to the Current Transaction If a START TRANSACTION Is Executed?
11. What Happens to the Current Transaction If a DDL Statement Is Executed?
12. What Happens to the Current Transaction If the Session Is Ended?
13. What Happens to the Current Transaction If the Session Is Killed?
14. How Does MySQL Handle Read Consistency?
15. What Are Transaction Isolation Levels?
16. How To View and Change the Current Transaction Isolation Level?
17. What Is a Data Lock?
18. How To Experiment Data Locks?
19. How Long a Transaction Will Wait for a Data Lock?
20. What Happens to Your Transactions When ERROR 1205 Occurred?
21. What Is a Dead Lock?
22. How To Experiment Dead Locks?
23. What Happens to Your Transactions When ERROR 1213 Occurred?
24. What Are the Impacts on Applications from Locks, Timeouts, and DeadLocks?

Please note that all answers and tutorials are based on MySQL 5.0 with transaction-safe storage engines, like InnoDB. Sometimes you may need to run previous tutorials in order to continue a later tutorial.

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