Autonomous Transactions in Oracle

Autonomous Transactions in Oracle

Autonomous Transaction is a new feature in ORACLE starting from 8i. It allows setting up independent transactions that can be called from within other transactions. It lets you suspend the main transaction (without committing or rolling back), perform some DML operations, commit or roll back those operations (without any effect on the main transaction), and then return to the main transaction.
Being independent of the main transaction (almost like a separate session), an autonomous transaction does not see the uncommitted changes from the main transaction. It also does not share locks with the main transaction. Changes committed by an autonomous transaction are visible to other sessions/transactions immediately, regardless of whether the main transaction is committed or not. These changes also become visible to the main transaction when it resumes, provided its isolation level is set to READ COMMITTED (which is the default).
The following types of PL/SQL blocks can be defined as autonomous transactions:

• Stored procedures and functions.
• Local procedures and functions defined in a PL/SQL declaration block.
• Packaged procedures and functions.
• Type methods.
• Top-level anonymous blocks.

Any of the routines can be marked as autonomous simply by using the following syntax anywhere in the declarative section of the routine (putting it at the top is recommended for better readability):

Example of an autonomous transactions:

DECLARE

PRAGMA AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION;

BEGIN

FOR i IN 3 .. 10 LOOP

    INSERT INTO at_test (id, description)

    VALUES (i, 'Description for ' || i);

  END LOOP;

  COMMIT;

END;