> maybe there are problem domains where you can get away without transactions, but I'm quite sure that a marketplace that arranges transportation for fee is not

> maybe there are problem domains where you can get away without transactions, but I'm quite sure that a marketplace that arranges transportation for fee is not one of them. I think you'd be surprised/alarmed at how little transactions actually get used in the software world. Not just on small systems where it doesn't matter but I've seen a complete absence of them in big financial ones handling billions of dollars worth transactions (the real world kind) a day. Some senior, highly paid people even defend this practice for performance reasons because they don't realize the performance cost of implicit transactions. And this is just the in process stuff where transactions are totally feasible, it get's even worse when you look at how much is moved around via csv files to FTP and excel sheets attached to emails. I've spent the last 2 weeks being paid to fix data consistency issues that should never have been issues in the first place. Maybe when we're teaching database theory we shouldn't start at select/join but at begin transaction/commit/rollback?