I would like to create an interface for manipulating invoices in a transaction-like manner.
The database consists of an invoices table, which holds billing information, and an invoice_lines table, which holds line items for the invoices. The website is a set of scripts which allow the addition, modification, and removal of invoices and their corresponding lines.
The problem I have is this, I would like the ACID properties of the database to be reflected in the web application.
- Atomic: When the user hits save, either the entire invoice is modified or the entire invoice is not changed at all.
- Consistent: The application code already ensures consistency, lines cannot be added to non-existent invoices. Invoice IDs cannot be duplicated.
- Isolated: If a user is in the middle of a set of changes to an invoice, I would like to hide those changes from other users until the user clicks save.
- Durable: If the web site dies, the data should be safe. This already works.
If I were writing a desktop application, it would maintain a connection to the MySQL database at all times, allowing me to simply use the BEGIN TRANSACTION and COMMIT at the beginning and end of the edit.
From what I understand you cannot BEGIN TRANSACTION on one PHP page and COMMIT on a different page because the connection is closed between pages.
Is there a way to make this possible without extensions? From what I have found, only SQL Relay does this (but it is an extension).
you don’t want to have long running transactions, because that’ll limit concurrency. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_pattern