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Long ago we briefly had an "autocommit" GUC that turned server-side autocommit on and off. That behavior was removed in 7.4 after concluding that it broke far too much client-side logic, and making clients cope with both behaviors was impractical. But the GUC variable was left behind, so as not to break any client code that might be trying to read its value. Enough time has now passed that we should remove the GUC completely. Whatever vestigial backwards-compatibility benefit it had is outweighed by the risk of confusion for newbies who assume it ought to do something, as per a recent complaint from Wolfgang Wilhelm. In passing, adjust what seemed to me a rather confusing documentation reference to libpq's autocommit behavior. libpq as such knows nothing about autocommit, so psql is probably what was meant.
PostgreSQL Database Management System ===================================== This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL database management system. PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions. This distribution also contains C language bindings. PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here: http://www.postgresql.org/download See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install PostgreSQL. That file also lists supported operating systems and hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL system. Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT. A comprehensive documentation set is included in this distribution; it can be read as described in the installation instructions. The latest version of this software may be obtained at http://www.postgresql.org/download/. For more information look at our web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.