In previous Berkeley DB releases, the DB_AUTO_COMMIT flag was used in the C and C++ Berkeley DB APIs to wrap operations within a transaction without explicitly creating a transaction and passing the TXN handle as part of the operation method call. In the 4.4 release, the DB_AUTO_COMMIT flag no longer needs to be explicitly specified.

In the 4.4 release, specifying the DB_AUTO_COMMIT flag to the DB_ENV->set_flags() method causes all database modifications in that environment to be transactional; specifying DB_AUTO_COMMIT to the DB->open() method causes all modifications to that database to be transactional; specifying DB_AUTO_COMMIT to the DB_ENV->dbremove() methods causes those specific operations to be transactional.

No related application changes are required for this release, as the DB_AUTO_COMMIT flag is ignored where it is no longer needed. However, application writers are encouraged to remove uses of the DB_AUTO_COMMIT flag in places where it is no longer needed.

Similar changes have been made to the Berkeley DB Tcl API. These changes are not optional, and Tcl applications will need to remove the -auto_commit flag from methods where it is no longer needed.