4 PREPARE TRANSACTION — prepare the current transaction for two-phase
9 PREPARE TRANSACTION transaction_id
13 PREPARE TRANSACTION prepares the current transaction for two-phase
14 commit. After this command, the transaction is no longer associated
15 with the current session; instead, its state is fully stored on disk,
16 and there is a very high probability that it can be committed
17 successfully, even if a database crash occurs before the commit is
20 Once prepared, a transaction can later be committed or rolled back with
21 COMMIT PREPARED or ROLLBACK PREPARED, respectively. Those commands can
22 be issued from any session, not only the one that executed the original
25 From the point of view of the issuing session, PREPARE TRANSACTION is
26 not unlike a ROLLBACK command: after executing it, there is no active
27 current transaction, and the effects of the prepared transaction are no
28 longer visible. (The effects will become visible again if the
29 transaction is committed.)
31 If the PREPARE TRANSACTION command fails for any reason, it becomes a
32 ROLLBACK: the current transaction is canceled.
37 An arbitrary identifier that later identifies this transaction
38 for COMMIT PREPARED or ROLLBACK PREPARED. The identifier must be
39 written as a string literal, and must be less than 200 bytes
40 long. It must not be the same as the identifier used for any
41 currently prepared transaction.
45 PREPARE TRANSACTION is not intended for use in applications or
46 interactive sessions. Its purpose is to allow an external transaction
47 manager to perform atomic global transactions across multiple databases
48 or other transactional resources. Unless you're writing a transaction
49 manager, you probably shouldn't be using PREPARE TRANSACTION.
51 This command must be used inside a transaction block. Use BEGIN to
54 It is not currently allowed to PREPARE a transaction that has executed
55 any operations involving temporary tables or the session's temporary
56 namespace, created any cursors WITH HOLD, or executed LISTEN, UNLISTEN,
57 or NOTIFY. Those features are too tightly tied to the current session
58 to be useful in a transaction to be prepared.
60 If the transaction modified any run-time parameters with SET (without
61 the LOCAL option), those effects persist after PREPARE TRANSACTION, and
62 will not be affected by any later COMMIT PREPARED or ROLLBACK PREPARED.
63 Thus, in this one respect PREPARE TRANSACTION acts more like COMMIT
66 All currently available prepared transactions are listed in the
67 pg_prepared_xacts system view.
71 It is unwise to leave transactions in the prepared state for a long
72 time. This will interfere with the ability of VACUUM to reclaim
73 storage, and in extreme cases could cause the database to shut down to
74 prevent transaction ID wraparound (see Section 24.1.5). Keep in mind
75 also that the transaction continues to hold whatever locks it held. The
76 intended usage of the feature is that a prepared transaction will
77 normally be committed or rolled back as soon as an external transaction
78 manager has verified that other databases are also prepared to commit.
80 If you have not set up an external transaction manager to track
81 prepared transactions and ensure they get closed out promptly, it is
82 best to keep the prepared-transaction feature disabled by setting
83 max_prepared_transactions to zero. This will prevent accidental
84 creation of prepared transactions that might then be forgotten and
85 eventually cause problems.
89 Prepare the current transaction for two-phase commit, using foobar as
90 the transaction identifier:
91 PREPARE TRANSACTION 'foobar';
95 PREPARE TRANSACTION is a PostgreSQL extension. It is intended for use
96 by external transaction management systems, some of which are covered
97 by standards (such as X/Open XA), but the SQL side of those systems is
102 COMMIT PREPARED, ROLLBACK PREPARED