How safe do you think I would be by not doing a commit() before rendering my response, but just doing a flush()? The idea is that we don't want the response to be written back to the browser and then at the end of it all, we try to commit and something goes wrong. Would flush do most all of the checks that I need so that I can be fairly sure that the commit() will succeed? Another option is to just buffer the response data and only write it if the transaction commits (I like this idea).