On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 4:54 PM Christophe Pettus <xof@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sep 25, 2024, at 13:49, Greg Sabino Mullane <htamfids@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> BEGIN ISOLATION MODE REPEATABLE READ SNAPSHOT NOW;
This might well be a failure of imagination on my part, but when would it pragmatically matter that the snapshot is taken at the first statement as opposed to at BEGIN?
I could imagine lots of cases where you know something is about to happen (say, a major delete), and you want to get a snapshot of the database as it existed just before that point. Many people will (quite understandably) assume that a BEGIN ISOLATION MODE <non read committed>; command would do just that, and be quite surprised to find that when they actually query the table in that first process, the rows are not there.
It's certainly a non-intuitive behavior. I understand why we do it this way, but perhaps this warrants a stronger warning in the docs at least? It's too late in the day for me to tackle that now, but I'll throw it out there.
Cheers,
Greg
