You’re right: at the standard isolation level, read committed, you do not need to wrap select statements in transactions. Select statements will be protected from dirty reads whether you wrap them in a transaction or not.
connection 1: connection 2:
begin transaction
update user set name="Bill" where id = 1
select name from users where id = 1
rollback transaction
The select statement will not read the rolled-back update: it doesn’t matter that they are not wrapped in a transaction.
If you need repeatable reads, then wrapping selects in a default transaction doesn’t help:
connection 1: connection 2:
begin transaction
select name from users where id = 1
update user set name="Bill" where id = 1
select name from users where id = 1
commit transaction
The begin and commit statements won’t help here: the second select may read the old name, or it may read the new name.
However, if you run at a higher isolation level, like serializable or repeatable read, the group will be protected from non-repeatable reads:
connection 1: connection 2:
set transaction isolation level
repeatable read
begin transaction
select name from users where id = 1
update user set name="Bill" where id = 1
select name from users where id = 1 |
commit transaction |
|--> executed here
In this scenario, the update will block until the first transaction is complete.
Higher isolation levels are rarely used because they lower the number of people that can work in the database at the same time. At the highest level, serializable, a reporting query halts any update activity.