Autonomous Transaction

In Oracle's database products, an autonomous transaction is an independent transaction that is initiated by another transaction.

Autonomous Transactions are independant transactions that can be called from within another transaction.

You can call Autonomous Transaction from within PL/SQL Block using pragma Autonomous_transaction

When an autonomous transaction is called, the original transaction (calling transaction) is temporarily suspended. The autonomous transaction must commit or roll back before it returns control to the calling transaction.

The easiest way to understand autonomous transactions is to see them in action. To do this, we create a test table and populate it with two rows. Notice that the data is not commited.

CREATE TABLE at_test (
id NUMBER NOT NULL,
description VARCHAR2(50) NOT NULL
);

INSERT INTO at_test (id, description) VALUES (1, 'Description for 1');
INSERT INTO at_test (id, description) VALUES (2, 'Description for 2');

SELECT * FROM at_test;

ID DESCRIPTION
---------- --------------------------------------------------
1 Description for 1
2 Description for 2

2 rows selected.

SQL>
Next, we insert another 8 rows using an anonymous block declared as an autonomous transaction, which contains a commit statement.

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;
/

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

SELECT * FROM at_test;

ID DESCRIPTION
---------- --------------------------------------------------
1 Description for 1
2 Description for 2
3 Description for 3
4 Description for 4
5 Description for 5
6 Description for 6
7 Description for 7
8 Description for 8
9 Description for 9
10 Description for 10

10 rows selected.

SQL>
As expected, we now have 10 rows in the table. If we now issue a rollback statement we get the following result.

ROLLBACK;
SELECT * FROM at_test;

ID DESCRIPTION
---------- --------------------------------------------------
3 Description for 3
4 Description for 4
5 Description for 5
6 Description for 6
7 Description for 7
8 Description for 8
9 Description for 9
10 Description for 10

8 rows selected.

SQL>
The 2 rows inserted by our current session (transaction) have been rolled back, while the rows inserted by the autonomous transactions remain. The presence of the PRAGMA AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION compiler directive made the anonymous block run in its own transaction, so the internal commit statement did not affect the calling session. As a result rollback was still able to affect the DML issued by the current statement.