ActiveRecord provides you with the transaction mechanism. It allows you to ensure that while transaction executes, all of the commands will commit successfully or the will be rolled back if any of the transactions fail.

In order to set up ActiveRecord with transactions, you need to include active_record/transactions in your code. Adding records to many-to-many relationship table may be a good example of using transactions in ActiveRecord. In this example, we need to update entity table as well as relationship table and ensure that both tables are updated. If one update fails then entire update is rolled back to its original state.

Example of ActiveRecord transaction is presented below

class MyClass
 def my_method
  transaction do
   author = Person.create(:name=>”James”)
   ceate(:author => [author], :title => “My Title”
  end
 end
end

You can see from the example above that we create author first and then a record with the author object. However, if our main create fails then author object creation will be rolled back by ActiveRecord.

ActiveRecord transactions utilizes native transactions of the target database type. ActiveRecord transaction is versatile enough to restore not only database to prior state but also object’s variables.