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Database transaction
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A database transaction comprises a unit of work performed within a database management system (or similar system) against a database, and treated in a coherent and reliable way independent of other transactions. Transactions in a database environment have two main purposes:
- To provide reliable units of work that allow correct recovery from failures and keep a database consistent even in cases of system failure, when execution stops (completely or partially) and many operations upon a database remain uncompleted, with unclear status.
- To provide isolation between programs accessing a database concurrently.
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Encyclopedia
A database transaction comprises a unit of work performed within a database management system (or similar system) against a database, and treated in a coherent and reliable way independent of other transactions. Transactions in a database environment have two main purposes:
- To provide reliable units of work that allow correct recovery from failures and keep a database consistent even in cases of system failure, when execution stops (completely or partially) and many operations upon a database remain uncompleted, with unclear status.
- To provide isolation between programs accessing a database concurrently. Without isolation the programs' outcomes are typically erroneous.
A database transaction, by definition, must be atomic, consistent, isolated and durable. Database practitioners often refer to these properties of database transactions using the acronym ACID.
Transactions provide an "all-or-nothing" proposition, stating that each work-unit performed in a database must either complete in its entirety or have no effect whatsoever. Further, the system must isolate each transaction from other transactions, results must conform to existing constraints in the database, and transactions that complete successfully must get written to durable storage.
Some systems also refer to transactions as LUWs: Logical Units of Work.
Purpose
Databases and other data stores which treat the integrity of data as paramount often include the ability to handle transactions to maintain the integrity of data. A single transaction consists of one or more independent units of work, each reading and/or writing information to a database or other data store. When this happens it is often important to ensure that all such processing leaves the database or data store in a consistent state.
Examples from double-entry accounting systems often illustrate the concept of transactions. In double-entry accounting every debit requires the recording of an associated credit. If one writes a check for €100 to buy groceries, a transactional double-entry accounting system must record the following two entries to cover the single transaction:
- Debit €100 to Groceries Expense Account
- Credit €100 to Checking Account
A transactional system would make both entries — or both entries would fail. By treating the recording of multiple entries as an atomic transactional unit of work the system maintains the integrity of the data recorded. In other words, nobody ends up with a situation in which a debit is recorded but no associated credit is recorded, or vice versa.
Transactional databases
Most relational database management systems fall into the category of databases that support transactions: transactional databases.
In a database system a single transaction might consist of one or more data-manipulation statements and queries, each reading and/or writing information in the database. Users of database systems consider consistency and integrity of data as highly important. A simple transaction is usually issued to the database system in a language like SQL wrapped in a transaction, using a pattern similar to the following:
- Begin the transaction
- Execute several data manipulations and queries
- If no errors occur then commit the transaction and end it
- If errors occur then rollback the transaction and end it
If no errors occurred during the execution of the transaction then the system commits the transaction. A transaction commit operation applies all data manipulations within the scope of the transaction and persists the results to the database. If an error occurs during the transaction, or if the user specifies a rollback operation, the data manipulations within the transaction are not persisted to the database. In no case can a partial transaction be committed to the database since that would leave the database in an inconsistent state.
Internally, multi-user databases store and process transactions, often by using a transaction ID or XID.
In SQL
A START TRANSACTION statement in SQL or, on some systems, any statement that will modify data, starts a transaction within a relational database management system (RDBMS).
The result of any work done after this point will remain invisible to other database-users until the system processes a COMMIT statement. A ROLLBACK statement can also occur, which will undo any work performed since the START TRANSACTION command. Both COMMIT and ROLLBACK will end the transaction: another START TRANSACTION will need to be issued to start a new one.
Some database systems allow the synonyms BEGIN, BEGIN WORK and BEGIN TRANSACTION, and may have other options available.
Distributed transactions
Database systems implement distributed transactions as transactions against multiple applications or hosts. A distributed transaction enforces the ACID properties over multiple systems or data stores, and might include systems such as databases, file systems, messaging systems, and other applications. In a distributed transaction a coordinating service ensures that all parts of the transaction are applied to all relevant systems. As with database and other transactions, if any part of the transaction fails, the entire transaction is rolled back across all affected systems.
Transactional filesystems
The Namesys Reiser4 filesystem for Linux
and the version of the Microsoft NTFS filesystem
both support transactions, but file-system transactions are rarely used in practice due to lack of compatibility with older systems.
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