Re: set autocommit only for select statements

On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 08:00:35AM -0400, Mladen Gogala wrote:
> On 4/12/22 02:31, Holger Jakobs wrote:
> > What you write about psql sending a COMMIT statement after each
> > statement is wrong. It may be true for other database systems.
> > 
> > PostgreSQL as a server commits each statement automatically unless the
> > client has started a transaction with BEGIN or START TRANSACTION
> > statements.
> > 
> > This can be proved easily by not using psql as a client, but some
> > programming language.
> > 
> > Regards,
> 
> If what you are saying was true, then autocommit would be a database mode,
> not a tool mode. It isn't a database mode. Q.E.D.

That's actually mostly true.  Postgres will start an implicit transaction for
every query (or multiple queries) outside a transaction and will implicitly
commit it after a successful execution.  The only difference is there you won't
see a BEGIN / COMMIT anywhere, but the same underlying code will be executed.