[Dbix-class] ANN - SQLite 3.6.8 adds nested transactions

[Toby Corkindale]

Darren Duncan wrote:
> Good news everyone!
> 
> The SQLite DBMS, as of the new version 3.6.8, now has nested transaction 
> support.
> 
> See http://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_6_8.html for the release 
> announcement, and http://www.sqlite.org/lang_savepoint.html for 
> documentation of the feature.
> 
> As far as I was concerned, and AFAIK had argued in the past, that was 
> the single most important piece of missing functionality.  Something 
> whose presence can make reliable database development an order of 
> magnitude easier.  Unlike some add-on features which could be done in 
> wrappers, nested transactions was definitely something that was only 
> appropriate to be implemented in the same low level as normal 
> transactions in the DBMS.  Its about code being able to declare and have 
> enforced at any level of granularity that a set of operations is atomic, 
> as a transaction, without worrying about what calling code is doing with 
> transactions, and making it easier to do error handling and retry/abort 
> etc.
> 
> I'm letting you know about this update today as encouragement to make 
> use of the feature in any of your applications or DBMS toolkits that do 
> or want to support SQLite.  It is now also easier to implement TTM's 
> concept of a "D" language (which cares about reliability and ease of 
> use) over SQLite.
> 
> Note that I'm promoting this under the assumption the new feature works 
> as advertised and is efficient; if not, presumably any deficiencies will 
> be soon fixed; I will be testing it myself before too long.

The announcement is good news, but one wonders how long we'll wait to 
see the feature supported in DBD::SQLite for Perl.. I think it's still 
using version 3.4.2 of SQLite, from quite some time back!
(You can get it to compile against a more recent local version of 
SQLite, but regular users will not have done that, so you can't really 
use those features and expect them to work with your end-users.)

-Toby