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Transaction Management

DuckDB supports ACID database transactions. Transactions provide isolation, i.e., changes made by a transaction are not visible from concurrent transactions until it is committed. A transaction can also be aborted, which discards any changes it made so far.

Statements

DuckDB provides the following statements for transaction management.

Starting a Transaction

To start a transaction, run:

BEGIN TRANSACTION;

Committing a Transaction

You can commit a transaction to make it visible to other transactions and to write it to persistent storage (if using DuckDB in persistent mode). To commit a transaction, run:

COMMIT;

If you are not in an active transaction, the COMMIT statement will fail.

Rolling Back a Transaction

You can abort a transaction. This operation, also known as rolling back, will discard any changes the transaction made to the database. To abort a transaction, run:

ROLLBACK;

You can also use the abort command, which has an identical behavior:

ABORT;

If you are not in an active transaction, the ROLLBACK and ABORT statements will fail.

Example

We illustrate the use of transactions through a simple example.

CREATE TABLE person (name VARCHAR, age BIGINT);

BEGIN TRANSACTION;
INSERT INTO person VALUES ('Ada', 52);
COMMIT;

BEGIN TRANSACTION;
DELETE FROM person WHERE name = 'Ada';
INSERT INTO person VALUES ('Bruce', 39);
ROLLBACK;

SELECT * FROM person;

The first transaction (inserting “Ada”) was committed but the second (deleting “Ada” and inserting “Bruce”) was aborted. Therefore, the resulting table will only contain <'Ada', 52>.

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