What should a transactional program do when an error occurs?
Any time an error occurs, such that a transactionally protected set of operations cannot complete successfully, the transaction must be aborted. While deadlock is by far the most common of these errors, there are other possibilities; for example, running out of disk space for the filesystem. In Berkeley DB transactional applications, there are three classes of error returns: “expected” errors, “unexpected but recoverable” errors, and a single “unrecoverable” error. Expected errors are errors like DB_NOTFOUND, which indicates that a searched-for key item is not present in the database. Applications may want to explicitly test for and handle this error, or, in the case where the absence of a key implies the enclosing transaction should fail, simply call DB_TXN->abort. Unexpected but recoverable errors are errors like DB_LOCK_DEADLOCK, which indicates that an operation has been selected to resolve a deadlock, or a system error such as EIO, which likely indicates that the filesystem has no
