php autocommit,PHP: mysqli::autocommit - Manual

It's worth noting that you can perform transactions without disabling autocommit just using standard sql. "START TRANSACTION;" will start a transaction. "COMMIT;" will commit the results and "ROLLBACK;" will revert to the pre-transaction state.

CREATE TABLE and CREATE DATABASE (and probably others) are always commited immediately and your transaction appears to terminate. Thus any commands before and after will be commited, even if a subsequent rollback is attempted.

If you are in the middle of a transaction and you call mysqli_close() it appears that you get the funcitonality of an implicit rollback.

I can't reproduce the "code bug causes lock" problem outlined below (I always get a successful rollback and the script will run umtine times successfully). Therefore, I would suggest that the problem is fixed in php-5.2.2.