START TRANSACTION START TRANSACTION 7 SQL - Language Statements START TRANSACTION start a transaction block START TRANSACTION [ transaction_mode [, ...] ] where transaction_mode is one of: ISOLATION LEVEL { SERIALIZABLE | REPEATABLE READ | READ COMMITTED | READ UNCOMMITTED } READ WRITE | READ ONLY [ NOT ] DEFERRABLE This command begins a new transaction block. If the isolation level, read/write mode, or deferrable mode is specified, the new transaction has those characteristics, as if SET TRANSACTION was executed. This is the same as the BEGIN command. Refer to for information on the meaning of the parameters to this statement. In the standard, it is not necessary to issue START TRANSACTION to start a transaction block: any SQL command implicitly begins a block. PostgreSQL's behavior can be seen as implicitly issuing a COMMIT after each command that does not follow START TRANSACTION (or BEGIN), and it is therefore often called autocommit. Other relational database systems might offer an autocommit feature as a convenience. The DEFERRABLE transaction_mode is a PostgreSQL language extension. The SQL standard requires commas between successive transaction_modes, but for historical reasons PostgreSQL allows the commas to be omitted. See also the compatibility section of .