thanks for the reply...

You can do it by subclassing DBI - possible, but not easy.

i actually started down this track, until i read the source of the DBI module and realised how many objects/packages were involved/would have to be overriden...

It is normally a Good Thing (tm) to have short transactions. Nested transactions are often a sign of design failures.

i agree that transactions (and thus table/column locks) should be kept short, however, in this case, all 'mini-transactions' must either all fail, or all succeed. hence, it seems the only answer is to perform a single, rather large transaction commit/rollback right at the end.

d_i_r_t_y