Transaction management is an important topic in the database course. This remains true whether the subject has an application focus or a systems internals focus. All the standard textbooks use "toy" examples of transactions, expressed as sequences of simple operations such as reading or writing data items. In this paper we argue that the teacher should choose examples which are closer to the students' experiences in other topics of the course, that is, the transactions should be like programs with SQL statements. We discuss the requirements that must be considered in choosing useful examples, and we give a set of examples that we have constructed to meet many of these requirements.