designing-application-transactions

What problem does it solve?

Guides application developers in designing correct, performant transaction patterns for CockroachDB, covering transaction lifetime, implicit vs explicit transactions, retry handling with exponential backoff, pushing invariants into SQL, selective pessimistic locking, set-based operations, connection pooling, prepared statements, keyset pagination, follower reads, and separating business logic from database logic. Use when building applications on CockroachDB, designing transaction workflows, handling retries, optimizing application-layer database interactions, or configuring connection pools.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Designing transaction patterns to ensure correctness and resilience under serialization failures.
• Deciding between implicit autocommit and explicit transactions, with guidance on when to use each.
• Implementing retry backoff strategies and idempotent operations to safely handle contention.
• Applying set-based SQL patterns, proper locking, and avoiding read-modify-write loops.
• Guidance on integrating transaction design with application architecture, including connection pooling and separation of concerns.

Quick Start

Review your current transaction flows and implement short-lived transactions, guarded updates, and proper retry logic per CockroachDB best practices.