There is something called auto-commit, when you supply more than one query delimited by ; semicolon all-or-none is done if one fails. No need for BEGIN;COMMIT;ROLLBACK when doing one query. its logic to mee pg_affected_rows() returns affected rows and if you want to do 2 queries apart from each other.. do a BEGIN and then 1 and get pg_affected_rows() then do 2 and get pg_affected_rows() and then finally do COMMIT;