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A nested transaction is used to provide a transactional guarantee for a subset of operations performed within the scope of a larger transaction. Doing this allows you to commit and abort the subset of operations independently of the larger transaction.
The rules to the usage of a nested transaction are as follows:
While the nested (child) transaction is active, the parent transaction may not perform any operations other than to commit or abort, or to create more child transactions.
Committing a nested transaction has no effect on the state of the parent transaction. The parent transaction is still uncommitted. However, the parent transaction can now see any modifications made by the child transaction. Those modifications, of course, are still hidden to all other transactions until the parent also commits.
Likewise, aborting the nested transaction has no effect on the state of the parent transaction. The only result of the abort is that neither the parent nor any other transactions will see any of the database modifications performed under the protection of the nested transaction.
If the parent transaction commits or aborts while it has active children, the child transactions are resolved in the same way as the parent. That is, if the parent aborts, then the child transactions abort as well. If the parent commits, then whatever modifications have been performed by the child transactions are also committed.
The locks held by a nested transaction are not released when that transaction commits. Rather, they are now held by the parent transaction until such a time as that parent commits.
Any database modifications performed by the nested transaction are not visible outside of the larger encompassing transaction until such a time as that parent transaction is committed.
The depth of the nesting that you can achieve with nested transaction is limited only by memory.
To create a nested transaction, simply pass the parent transaction's handle when you created the nested transaction's handle. For example:
/* parent transaction */
DB_TXN *parent_txn, *child_txn;
ret = envp->txn_begin(envp, NULL, &parent_txn, 0);
/* child transaction */
ret = envp->txn_begin(envp, parent_txn, &child_txn, 0);