Brady Ouren

Postgres savepoint

Postgres savepoint and try/catch

I ran into a simple, but necessary bit of postgres knowledge this week while using a bloom filter to purge outdated database entries. The problem I encountered was within a try/catch block. I was catching a ForeignKeyError if the deletion of a row failed. Since I was doing this transaction within a cursor, I would get an error along the lines of: "Current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block"

The fix

Fortunately, to fix this you just add a savepoint within the try block to rollback to in case of an exception. I’ll give a bit of an example.

query = 'declare myc cursor for select * from tableToCheck'

You need to declare a cursor name (in this case ‘myc’) for the transaction to use.