What are transaction Control statements? | CRM Curator

Transaction control statements in Apex are two methods on the Database class that let you snapshot a point in the transaction and roll back to it on failure:

Savepoint sp = Database.setSavepoint();   // mark a point
Database.rollback(sp);                    // undo every DML since that mark

That’s the whole API. Apex does not have free-standing SQL-style BEGIN/COMMIT/ROLLBACK — your transaction begins implicitly when the request enters Apex and commits when the request returns successfully. These two methods are the only knobs you get.

The vocabulary

Savepoint — an opaque token, type System.Savepoint, returned by Database.setSavepoint(). It represents a snapshot of the database state at that instant.
Rollback — Database.rollback(savepoint) discards every DML change made after the savepoint was created.

What gets rolled back

State	Rolled back?
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE/UPSERT done after the savepoint	Yes — fully reverted
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE done before the savepoint	No — retained
Record locks taken since the savepoint	Yes — released
Salesforce-assigned Ids on rolled-back inserts	Discarded (don’t reuse them)
`System.debug` output	No (debug stream isn’t transactional)
`EventBus.publish` of Publish-Immediately events	No — already published outside the tx
`EventBus.publish` of Publish-After-Commit events	Yes — those are queued, never published
Governor-limit counters (SOQL, DML, CPU, heap)	No — these keep accumulating
`@future` calls already enqueued in this tx	Yes — they’re discarded if the calling tx rolls back
Static variable values	No — Apex statics are not transactional state

Multiple savepoints

You can take multiple savepoints in one transaction and roll back to any of them:

Savepoint sp1 = Database.setSavepoint();
insert acc1;

Savepoint sp2 = Database.setSavepoint();
insert acc2;

try {
    insert acc3;
    update orders;
} catch (Exception e) {
    Database.rollback(sp2); // undo acc3 and orders, but keep acc2
}

Rolling back to sp1 would have undone acc2 as well. Savepoints aren’t strictly nested — they’re more like checkpoints on a timeline.

A cap on savepoints

A single transaction can hold up to five savepoints simultaneously. Setting a sixth invalidates the oldest one. This is rarely hit in practice — most code uses one or two.

What about pre-Apex transactions?

Two scenarios that look transactional but aren’t:

HTTP callouts — Http.send() is not transactional. If the callout succeeds and the Apex transaction later rolls back, the external system still saw the request. Idempotency keys are how you handle this in the real world.
Platform Events with “Publish Immediately” — sent outside the transaction. They survive a rollback. (This is sometimes a feature, sometimes a bug — depends on your intent.)

If you need an external action to roll back atomically with Apex, you usually can’t — that’s a distributed-systems problem. The pattern is to compensate (publish a “cancel” message) rather than try to roll back the external system.

Common antipatterns

Forgetting to set a savepoint before risky DML — when the exception fires, there’s nothing to roll back to except the start of the transaction (which Apex does for you anyway).
Setting a savepoint but never rolling back — if the operation succeeds, the savepoint is silently discarded at transaction end. Harmless, but signals confused intent.
Rolling back to free governor budget — it doesn’t. SOQL/DML/CPU counters are not transactional.
Using try/catch instead of a savepoint — catching an exception doesn’t undo the DML you already did before the catch block.

What interviewers are really looking for

The naming check: “Database.setSavepoint() and Database.rollback().” The senior signal includes: (1) Apex transactions are implicit — no BEGIN/COMMIT, (2) up to 5 savepoints in one tx, (3) rollback doesn’t free governor budget, (4) Ids from rolled-back inserts must be discarded, (5) callouts don’t roll back — you need compensating actions for cross-system consistency.

Verified against: Apex Developer Guide — Transaction Control, Database.rollback(). Last reviewed 2026-05-17.