PREPARE TRANSACTION

Function

Prepares the current transaction for two-phase commit.

After this command is executed, the transaction is no longer associated with the current session. Instead, its state is completely stored on disk, and it is highly likely to be committed successfully, even if the database crashes before.

Once prepared, a transaction can later be committed or rolled back with COMMIT PREPARED or ROLLBACK PREPARED, respectively. Those commands can be issued from any session, not only the one that executed the original transaction.

From the point of view of the issuing session, PREPARE TRANSACTION is not unlike a ROLLBACK command: after executing it, there is no active current transaction, and the effects of the prepared transaction are no longer visible. (The effects will become visible again if the transaction is committed.)

If the PREPARE TRANSACTION command fails for any reason, it becomes a ROLLBACK and the current transaction is canceled.

Precautions

The transaction function is maintained automatically by the database, and should be not visible to users.
When running the PREPARE TRANSACTION command, increasing the value of max_prepared_transactions in configuration file postgresql.conf. You are advised to set max_prepared_transactions to a value not less than that of max_connections so that one pending prepared transaction is available for each session.

Syntax

PREPARE TRANSACTION transaction_id;

Parameter Description

transaction_id

An arbitrary identifier that later identifies this transaction for COMMIT PREPARED or ROLLBACK PREPARED. The identifier must be different from those for current prepared transactions.

Value range: The identifier must be written as a string literal, and must be less than 200 bytes long.