没有事务的python-mysqldb

Question

I'm reading about how do transactions work in python's MySQLdb . In this tutorial , it says that:

In Python DB API, we do not call the BEGIN statement to start a transaction. A transaction is started when the cursor is created.

So a following line:

cur = con.cursor()

starts a transaction implicitly. It also says, that:

We must end a transaction with either a commit() or a rollback() method.

Do I understand it correctly, that MySQLdb uses transactions always and there's no way to turn this behavior off? Forcing user to enclose all queries in transactions seems a bit strange. If so - is there any explanation why is that?

Answer 1

I'm not a huge expert in this, but I think the feature you're looking for here is autocommit. This automatically commits your commands. Therefore you should be able to skip the 'BEGIN' statements.

Here's a page on it: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/connector-python/en/connector-python-connectargs.html

You set this up when you start the python MySQLdb instance:

conn=MySQLdb.connect(host='blah', autocommit=True)

You should then have a connection that doesn't worry about Transactions.

Some storage engines don't use transactions so if you use one, you won't need to worry about this detail: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_MySQL_database_engines

However, they can run into issues if your insert \\ update fails halfway through!