id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
32220	Add a 'durable' flag to transaction.atomic()	Adam Johnson	Ian Foote	"As discussed [https://twitter.com/IanFooteTech/status/1329793500674732035 on Twitter] following [https://seddonym.me/2020/11/19/trouble-atomic/ David Seddon's blog post].

`transaction.atomic()` guarantees the wrapped database operations is *atomic* - at the end of its wrapped block, operations within that block will all be applied, or all rolled back. In some situations it's also useful to guarantee that the wrapped operations are *durable* - at the end of the wrapped block, all operations have definitely been committed. `atomic()` doesn't guarantee this at the moment since its use may be wrapped by *another* `atomic()` higher in the stack, delaying the commit.

David Seddon's technique to guarantee durability is to wrap `atomic()` to first check if an `atomic()` is already active for the current connection (in other words, `connection.get_autocommit()` returns `False`), and raise an error if so.

On Twitter, Ian Foote suggested adding a `durable` flag to `atomic()` to add this behaviour to Django, to which Aymeric Augustin said it sounds like a good idea."	New feature	closed	Database layer (models, ORM)	dev	Normal	fixed			Ready for checkin	1	0	0	0	0	0