Understanding database transactions with Laravel

Database Transactions with Laravel

Table of Contents

• What are Database Transactions?

• How Laravel Simplifies Database Transactions

• Retrying Transactions

• Further Reading

  

What are Database Transactions?

When developing web applications, we often perform multiple operations on the database—such as creating a user, assigning a role, and sending a confirmation email. It’s critical that all these actions either succeed together or fail together. This principle is known as a database transaction.

A database transaction is a sequence of one or more operations treated as a single unit. If any operation fails, the entire transaction is rolled back—ensuring no partial changes are saved. On success, the transaction commits and all changes are applied.

Most modern relational databases, like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, support transactions natively.

How Laravel Simplifies Database Transactions

In raw SQL, you’d typically use:

BEGIN TRANSACTION;
-- SQL statements
COMMIT;
-- or ROLLBACK on error

Laravel makes this process much easier with the DB::transaction() method, which wraps your operations in a safe transaction block.

Example

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;

DB::transaction(function () {
    $room = Room::find(1);

    Booking::create([
        'user_id' => auth()->id(),
        'room_id' => $room->id,
    ]);

    Payment::create([
        'user_id' => auth()->id(),
        'room_id' => $room->rate,
    ]);
});

If either the Booking or Payment creation fails, Laravel will automatically roll back all changes—keeping your database consistent and error-free.

Retrying Transactions

Laravel also supports automatic retries in case of deadlocks or connection issues. You can pass a second argument to DB::transaction() to specify the number of retry attempts.

Example with Retries

DB::transaction(function () {
    // Your transactional logic
}, 3); // Retry up to 3 times

Further Reading

To dive deeper into database transactions, refer to the official Laravel documentation on database transactions.