I am little confused about original environment since MySQL does not support native commit and rollback. So has the original pre-port code got a lot of 'simulated' commit and rollback code ??

not true, transactions were introduced in version 3.23. so, surprising as it is, we did indeed have real transactions with mysql ;-) the only 'trick' is that we had to use the $dbh->do('begin'); ... ; $dbh->do('commit'); syntax rather than the begin and commit methods per se.

d_i_r_t_y