title: Django transaction management
body: <p>I have a django project in which database values need to be updated fairly often on their own. There's a cronjob that runs to update these values in the database, but some of the operations require atomic transactions. Does anybody know how to make a model method be a complete transaction in django without going through views?</p>
  
  <p>Ideally, I'd like to be able to start a transaction at the beginning of a method and commit it at the end, and then just be able to call that method from anywhere (a view or a cronjob) with the guarantee that the method is atomic.</p>
  
  <p>If you know how to do this, I also need to know whether or not, should the commit fail (due to a simultaneous write or something), the transaction is automatically re-attempted, or if I would have to manually catch a failure exception and re-call the method.</p>
  
  <p>Thank you.</p>