How to Rollback or Commit a Transaction in SQL Server

How to rollback or commit a transaction in SQL Server

The good news is a transaction in SQL Server can span multiple batches (each exec is treated as a separate batch.)

You can wrap your EXEC statements in a BEGIN TRANSACTION and COMMIT but you'll need to go a step further and rollback if any errors occur.

Ideally you'd want something like this:

BEGIN TRY
    BEGIN TRANSACTION 
        exec( @sqlHeader)
        exec(@sqlTotals)
        exec(@sqlLine)
    COMMIT
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH

    IF @@TRANCOUNT > 0
        ROLLBACK
END CATCH

The BEGIN TRANSACTION and COMMIT I believe you are already familiar with. The BEGIN TRY and BEGIN CATCH blocks are basically there to catch and handle any errors that occur. If any of your EXEC statements raise an error, the code execution will jump to the CATCH block.

Your existing SQL building code should be outside the transaction (above) as you always want to keep your transactions as short as possible.

How to commit and rollback transaction in sql server?

Don't use @@ERROR, use BEGIN TRY/BEGIN CATCH instead. See this article: Exception handling and nested transactions for a sample procedure:

create procedure [usp_my_procedure_name]
as
begin
    set nocount on;
    declare @trancount int;
    set @trancount = @@trancount;
    begin try
        if @trancount = 0
            begin transaction
        else
            save transaction usp_my_procedure_name;

        -- Do the actual work here

lbexit:
        if @trancount = 0   
            commit;
    end try
    begin catch
        declare @error int, @message varchar(4000), @xstate int;
        select @error = ERROR_NUMBER(), @message = ERROR_MESSAGE(), @xstate = XACT_STATE();
        if @xstate = -1
            rollback;
        if @xstate = 1 and @trancount = 0
            rollback
        if @xstate = 1 and @trancount > 0
            rollback transaction usp_my_procedure_name;

        raiserror ('usp_my_procedure_name: %d: %s', 16, 1, @error, @message) ;
        return;
    end catch   
end

Can I rollback a transaction I've already committed? (data loss)

No, you can't undo, rollback or reverse a commit.

STOP THE DATABASE!

(Note: if you deleted the data directory off the filesystem, do NOT stop the database. The following advice applies to an accidental commit of a DELETE or similar, not an rm -rf /data/directory scenario).

If this data was important, STOP YOUR DATABASE NOW and do not restart it. Use pg_ctl stop -m immediate so that no checkpoint is run on shutdown.

You cannot roll back a transaction once it has commited. You will need to restore the data from backups, or use point-in-time recovery, which must have been set up before the accident happened.

If you didn't have any PITR / WAL archiving set up and don't have backups, you're in real trouble.

Urgent mitigation

Once your database is stopped, you should make a file system level copy of the whole data directory - the folder that contains base, pg_clog, etc. Copy all of it to a new location. Do not do anything to the copy in the new location, it is your only hope of recovering your data if you do not have backups. Make another copy on some removable storage if you can, and then unplug that storage from the computer. Remember, you need absolutely every part of the data directory, including pg_xlog etc. No part is unimportant.

Exactly how to make the copy depends on which operating system you're running. Where the data dir is depends on which OS you're running and how you installed PostgreSQL.

Ways some data could've survived

If you stop your DB quickly enough you might have a hope of recovering some data from the tables. That's because PostgreSQL uses multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) to manage concurrent access to its storage. Sometimes it will write new versions of the rows you update to the table, leaving the old ones in place but marked as "deleted". After a while autovaccum comes along and marks the rows as free space, so they can be overwritten by a later INSERT or UPDATE. Thus, the old versions of the UPDATEd rows might still be lying around, present but inaccessible.

Additionally, Pg writes in two phases. First data is written to the write-ahead log (WAL). Only once it's been written to the WAL and hit disk, it's then copied to the "heap" (the main tables), possibly overwriting old data that was there. The WAL content is copied to the main heap by the bgwriter and by periodic checkpoints. By default checkpoints happen every 5 minutes. If you manage to stop the database before a checkpoint has happened and stopped it by hard-killing it, pulling the plug on the machine, or using pg_ctl in immediate mode you might've captured the data from before the checkpoint happened, so your old data is more likely to still be in the heap.

Now that you have made a complete file-system-level copy of the data dir you can start your database back up if you really need to; the data will still be gone, but you've done what you can to give yourself some hope of maybe recovering it. Given the choice I'd probably keep the DB shut down just to be safe.

Recovery

You may now need to hire an expert in PostgreSQL's innards to assist you in a data recovery attempt. Be prepared to pay a professional for their time, possibly quite a bit of time.

I posted about this on the Pg mailing list, and Виктор Егоров linked to depesz's post on pg_dirtyread, which looks like just what you want, though it doesn't recover TOASTed data so it's of limited utility. Give it a try, if you're lucky it might work.

See: pg_dirtyread on GitHub.

I've removed what I'd written in this section as it's obsoleted by that tool.

See also PostgreSQL row storage fundamentals

Prevention

See my blog entry Preventing PostgreSQL database corruption.

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On a semi-related side-note, if you were using two phase commit you could ROLLBACK PREPARED for a transction that was prepared for commit but not fully commited. That's about the closest you get to rolling back an already-committed transaction, and does not apply to your situation.

Correct use of transactions in SQL Server

Add a try/catch block, if the transaction succeeds it will commit the changes, if the transaction fails the transaction is rolled back:

BEGIN TRANSACTION [Tran1]

  BEGIN TRY

      INSERT INTO [Test].[dbo].[T1] ([Title], [AVG])
      VALUES ('Tidd130', 130), ('Tidd230', 230)

      UPDATE [Test].[dbo].[T1]
      SET [Title] = N'az2' ,[AVG] = 1
      WHERE [dbo].[T1].[Title] = N'az'

      COMMIT TRANSACTION [Tran1]

  END TRY

  BEGIN CATCH

      ROLLBACK TRANSACTION [Tran1]

  END CATCH  

SQL Server : BEGIN TRAN ... COMMIT without ROLLBACK does not rollback depending on the error

But I am still wondering why the BEGIN TRAN without ROLLBACK does not work all the time. Does it really depend on the type of error as I guess?

You are right,it depends on type of error.Below statement by Erland helped me understand more on different variations of error handling in SQL Server.

Error handling in SQL Server is a very messy story. I asked the same question as you did in comp.databases.sybase in 1993 or so. I don't remember exactly what answers I got, but I don't think they were very good.

But this is the story: when an error occurs in SQL Server, the batch may be aborted and the transaction rolled back. Or the statement may be terminated, and the transaction continues.

Please don't ask about the logic in this, because there isn't any. Data-integrity violations usually don't abort the batch. But a conversion error often do.

To Microsoft's defence it can be said, that many of these bad decisions were taken in California when the product was still Sybase. On the other hand, Microsoft has very much effort to straighten out this, rather the opposite.

See the below screenshot for different scenarios

This link has excellent info on each behaviour

Error and Transaction Handling in SQL Server

This error

The transaction log for database 'MyDatabase' is full due to 'ACTIVE_TRANSACTION

can occur for many reasons. Some include

1. You have an active transaction which is presenting log space reuse
2. Heavy transaction which may require lot of log space and your disk may be full

Additional reference:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/6ae24a04-0ad3-4aba-b471-2bbbcd8d8626/with-the-transaction-primary-key-violation-error?forum=transactsql

Rollback and commit transaction SQL Server

Roughly your code will work fine:

OPEN CURSOR
    BEGIN TRANSACTION
        BEGIN TRY
           COMMIT
        END TRY

        BEGIN CATCH
            ROLLBACK
        END CATCH
    END TRANSACTION
CLOSE CURSOR

However, why do you want to use cursor? as far as I know, cursor performs slow in term of performance and once your transaction fail and go to rollback, all of your transaction in cursor will be rollback. CMIWW.

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