Techniques for recovering from session failures between clients and database servers are described herein. A session may be established between a client and a first database server, and a transaction may be opened to process a plurality of database commands. One or more commands associated with the transaction may be received from the client at the database server. Each received command has an associated command identifier. A transaction log stores the command identifier associated with each received command and indicates whether each received command has been successfully executed at the database server. After a session failure, the session is reestablished, and a command identifier for a further command is received from the client. If the command identifier associated with the further command is determined to have been stored in the transaction log, the command does not need to be executed, and the transaction may continue.