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A database transaction symbolizes a unit of work, performed within a database management system (or similar system) against a database, that is treated in a coherent and reliable way independent of other transactions. A transaction generally represents any change in a database. Transactions in a database environment have two main purposes:
Examples of such operations are requesting a read operation, reading, writing, aborting, committing, requesting a lock, locking, etc. Often, only a subset of the transaction operation types are included in a schedule. Schedules are fundamental concepts in database concurrency control theory. In practice, most general purpose database systems ...
An example of an atomic transaction is a monetary transfer from bank account A to account B. It consists of two operations, withdrawing the money from account A and saving it to account B. Performing these operations in an atomic transaction ensures that the database remains in a consistent state , that is, money is neither lost nor created if ...
Going back to the example, when user A's transaction requests data that user B is modifying, the database provides A with the version of that data that existed when user B started his transaction. User A gets a consistent view of the database even if other users are changing data.
For example, transaction A may access portion X of the database, and transaction B may access portion Y of the database. If at that point, transaction A then tries to access portion Y of the database while transaction B tries to access portion X, a deadlock occurs, and neither transaction can move forward. Transaction-processing systems are ...
In the absence of a START TRANSACTION or similar statement, the semantics of SQL are implementation-dependent. The following example shows a classic transfer of funds transaction, where money is removed from one account and added to another. If either the removal or the addition fails, the entire transaction is rolled back.
Isolation is typically enforced at the database level. However, various client-side systems can also be used. It can be controlled in application frameworks or runtime containers such as J2EE Entity Beans [2] On older systems, it may be implemented systemically (by the application developers), for example through the use of temporary tables.
A database management system (DBMS) is a computer program (or more typically, a suite of them) designed to manage a database, a large set of structured data, and run operations on the data requested by numerous users. Typical examples of DBMS use include accounting, human resources and customer support systems.