Re: "Idle in Transaction" revisited.

Jeffrey Tenny wrote:

> I'm still running against 7.3.x, but if the above two paragraphs
> are true that's very problematic for me if I'm going to upgrade.
> My app also runs 24/7 and uses serializable transactions in pooled
> connections.
>
> Are you saying that I will see stale database state at the logical
> "start" of my transaction from a pooled connection?
>
> That's a showstopper for sure. If I'm confused please enlighten me.
> I've been holding off on upgrading because of the amount activity on
> this list about 7.4+ systems.

You'll only see the problem if you use a driver without a fix for the
premature-BEGIN problem.

Ideally you should be using the current stable driver even with a 7.3
server. The stable driver is intended to work against 7.3 servers
correctly, and you're missing out on many bugfixes (although
unfortunately not the premature-BEGIN one). AFAIK we haven't been
backporting fixes to the 7.3 branch for quite a while now, since the
latest drivers directly support 7.3.

7.3 is a bit of a special case with respect to transaction handling as
the 7.3-era drivers used the backend "set autocommit" functionality, but
then it went away again in 7.4 so we went back to explicit BEGIN. So
unfortunately unless you want to use the development driver or fix the
stable driver, you might be stuck with the 7.3 driver for now.

I think the plan is for the current development driver to become the
"stable" driver around the time that 8.0.0 is released. There has also
been discussion about dropping protocol V2 support in the driver (and
therefore 7.3 support) although we're keeping it for now. And the 7.3
server itself is getting pretty old.. You probably want to start
thinking about your upgrade path!

-O