The notes did say this, before my lovely hot black coffee destroyed them:

What are they? In mySQL 5, with a table storage type of “innodb” you can use transactions. This means, that you can make a set of changes together, like recording the removal of a credit, and the adding of an advert to a website, at one instance, even if it’s multiple mysql transactions within one connection.

You do that, by sending the command (literally “BEGIN;” or “begin;”) to start a transaction, run all the queries you need to run, and then run the commit if you want the all the changes to take, or rollback if you don’t. If any one of the sql queries fails after you’ve made a begin, and it shouldn’t have, you can rollback *all* the changes you’ve made to the database. Obviously, this needs one mySQL connection, but if you’re using more than one each run of the program you’re using, I’d be very surprised.