Are you saying that it's possible for an SQL server to allow to successfully commit a transaction where you modify a record, and then in a subsequent query, ret

Are you saying that it's possible for an SQL server to allow to successfully commit a transaction where you modify a record, and then in a subsequent query, return the old value of that record? I very much doubt this is true of any single-node SQL database. In contrast, any distributed system has this property (or it may refuse the query entirely) in the face of partitions.