What Happens When a Database Operation Fails Midway? NestJS Transactions to the Rescue

Imagine a simple money transfer scenario. John sends money to his friend Sarah. The system successfully deducts money from John's account, but before it can credit Sarah's account, the application crashes. Without proper safeguards, John's money would disappear from the system, creating inconsistent and unreliable financial records. To prevent this type of problem, database transactions are used. Transactions ensure that a group of related database operations either complete successfully together or fail together. If any part of the process encounters an error, all changes are reverted, ensuring that the database remains consistent. Transactions make database operations atomic. Atomicity means that all operations inside a transaction are treated as a single unit of work. Either every operation succeeds and is committed to the database, or all operations fail and are rolled back. Partial updates are never permanently stored. A database transaction is a group of one or more database operations executed as a single unit. Either all operations succeed together or all operations fail together. This guarantees database consistency even if an application crashes, a network failure occurs, or an unexpected error is encountered during execution. It is important to understand that a transaction is not simply a single database query. While individual queries such as save, update, or delete interact with the database, a transaction wraps multiple queries inside a controlled all-or-nothing boundary. This prevents partial updates and ensures data integrity throughout the process. Prerequisites Before starting, make sure you have the following: Basic knowledge of NestJS Basic understanding of TypeORM Basic knowledge of PostgreSQL Understanding of basic database operations (save, update, delete) in TypeORM Project Setup In this article, we will create a simple NestJS application to demonstrate the importance of transactional queries when multiple database write or update operations