Writing a script that either succeeds entirely or fails entirely

Database administration often involves applying a coordinated set of changes to the database. One of PostgreSQL’s greatest strengths is its transaction system, wherein almost all actions can be executed inside a transaction. This allows us to build a script with many actions that will either all succeed or all fail. This means that if any of these actions fail, then all the other actions in the script are rolled back and never become visible to any other user, which can be critically important in a production system. This property is referred to as atomicity in the sense that the script is intended as a single unit that cannot be split. This is the meaning of the A in the ACID properties of database transactions.

Transactions apply to Data Definition Language (DDL), which refers to the set of SQL commands that are used to define, modify, and delete database objects. The term DDL goes back many years, but it...