We really wanted to support a context manager there, believe me. IIRC the problem was there is/was no facility for retry with a context manager, so there would

We really wanted to support a context manager there, believe me. IIRC the problem was there is/was no facility for retry with a context manager, so there would still need to be structure around it. I could be wrong, though -- I only remember being seduced by the context manager option a couple times before running into the same wall. I don't think the context manager, even if it had been doable, would have supported composition in the style of: @transactional def thing_one(tr, *args): # stuff @transactional def thing_two(tr, *args): # other stuff @transactional def both_things(tr, *args): thing_one(tr, args) thing_two(tr, args) If it's not clear, in this case a caller could provide a database object to thing_one or thing_two and they would be executed as a single atomic transaction, but a call to both_things with a database object would execute both thing_one and thing_two inside of a single atomic transaction.