On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Tom Lane wrote:
> It seems to me that it'd be fairly easy to make BEGIN cause only
> a local state change in the backend; the actual transaction need not
> start until the first subsequent command is received.
[snip]
> In a very real sense, the transaction snapshot defines "when the
> transaction starts" --- so shouldn't now() agree?
>
> If we did both of these things, then the negatives of doing an early
> BEGIN would pretty much vanish, and we'd not need to complain that these
> client libraries are broken.
>
> Comments?
Both ideas sound like a win to me.
Jon