Message-ID: <64821.216.238.112.88.1059509762.squirrel@$HOSTNAME>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 16:16:02 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Does a the block of code within a stored procedure constitute a
	transaction?
From: <btober@seaworthysys.com>
To: <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
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I need to "manually" keep a sequence for each row of the employee table,
i.e., I don't want to use postgres's built-in sequences for this
application because the sequence numbers are used to generate expense
report numbers on a "per-employee" basis. That is, each employee has a
separate sequence counter, starting at one, to number their expense
reports. Since employees will come and go, I don't want to keep having to
create and delete postgres sequence objects as employees come and go.

Instead, I have a column of the employee table store the "last value" of
the corresponding expense report sequence counter, and in an ON INSERT
trigger to the expense report table, I call the following function to get
and increment the new sequence value:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION paid.expense_report_next(int4) RETURNS integer
AS '
DECLARE
  l_employee_pk ALIAS FOR $1;
  l_expense_report_seq INTEGER;
BEGIN
  SELECT INTO l_expense_report_seq expense_report_seq+1
    FROM employee
    WHERE employee_pk = l_employee_pk;

  UPDATE employee
    SET expense_report_seq = l_expense_report_seq
    WHERE employee_pk = l_employee_pk;
RETURN l_expense_report_seq;
END;'  LANGUAGE 'plpgsql' VOLATILE;


What I need to know is whether or not this is multi-user safe, i.e., will
the block of code in the procedure execute as a transaction so that if
more than one clerk creates an expense report for the same employee
simultaneously is it possible or impossible that value of the
employee.expense_report_seq gets updated by the second clerk between the
SELECT and UPDATE statements invoked by the first clerk?

And as a follow-up, should I add the FOR UPDATE clause to the SELECT
statement?

~Berend Tober