Module 17: Transactions

Database System Concepts, 7th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
 Outline

 Transaction Concept
 Transaction State
 Concurrent Executions
 Serializability
 Recoverability
 Implementation of Isolation
 Transaction Definition in SQL
 Testing for Serializability.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.2 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Transaction Concept

 A transaction is a unit of program execution that accesses and possibly

updates various data items.
 E.g., transaction to transfer $50 from account A to account B:
1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50
3. write(A)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 50
6. write(B)
 Two main issues to deal with:
• Failures of various kinds, such as hardware failures and system
crashes
• Concurrent execution of multiple transactions

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.3 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Example of Fund Transfer

 Transaction to transfer $50 from account A to account B:

1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50
3. write(A)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 50
6. write(B)
 Atomicity requirement
• If the transaction fails after step 3 and before step 6, money will be “lost”
leading to an inconsistent database state
 Failure could be due to software or hardware
• The system should ensure that updates of a partially executed transaction
are not reflected in the database
 Durability requirement — once the user has been notified that the transaction
has completed (i.e., the transfer of the $50 has taken place), the updates to the
database by the transaction must persist even if there are software or hardware
failures.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.4 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Example of Fund Transfer (Cont.)

 Consistency requirement in above example:

• The sum of A and B is unchanged by the execution of the transaction
 In general, consistency requirements include
• Explicitly specified integrity constraints such as primary keys and foreign
keys
• Implicit integrity constraints
 e.g., sum of balances of all accounts, minus sum of loan amounts must
equal value of cash-in-hand
• A transaction must see a consistent database.
• During transaction execution the database may be temporarily
inconsistent.
• When the transaction completes successfully the database must be
consistent
 Erroneous transaction logic can lead to inconsistency

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.5 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Example of Fund Transfer (Cont.)

 Isolation requirement — if between steps 3 and 6, another transaction T2

is allowed to access the partially updated database, it will see an
inconsistent database (the sum A + B will be less than it should be).

T1 T2
1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50
3. write(A)
read(A), read(B), print(A+B)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 50
6. write(B
 Isolation can be ensured trivially by running transactions serially
• That is, one after the other.
 However, executing multiple transactions concurrently has significant
benefits, as we will see later.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.6 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 ACID Properties
A transaction is a unit of program execution that accesses and possibly
updates various data items. To preserve the integrity of data the database
system must ensure:
 Atomicity. Either all operations of the transaction are properly reflected in
the database or none are.
 Consistency. Execution of a transaction in isolation preserves the
consistency of the database.
 Isolation. Although multiple transactions may execute concurrently, each
transaction must be unaware of other concurrently executing transactions.
Intermediate transaction results must be hidden from other concurrently
executed transactions.
• That is, for every pair of transactions Ti and Tj, it appears to Ti that either
Tj, finished execution before Ti started, or Tj started execution after Ti
finished.
 Durability. After a transaction completes successfully, the changes it has
made to the database persist, even if there are system failures.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.7 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Transaction State

 Active – the initial state; the transaction stays in this state while it is
executing
 Partially committed – after the final statement has been executed.
 Failed -- after the discovery that normal execution can no longer proceed.
 Aborted – after the transaction has been rolled back and the database
restored to its state prior to the start of the transaction. Two options after it
has been aborted:
• Restart the transaction
 Can be done only if no internal logical error
• Kill the transaction
 Committed – after successful completion.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.8 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Transaction State (Cont.)

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.9 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Concurrent Executions

 Multiple transactions are allowed to run concurrently in the system.

Advantages are:
• Increased processor and disk utilization, leading to better
transaction throughput
 E.g., one transaction can be using the CPU while another is
reading from or writing to the disk
• Reduced average response time for transactions: short transactions
need not wait behind long ones.
 Concurrency control schemes – mechanisms to achieve isolation
• That is, to control the interaction among the concurrent transactions in
order to prevent them from destroying the consistency of the database
 Will study in Chapter 15, after studying notion of correctness of
concurrent executions.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.10 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Schedules

 Schedule – a sequences of instructions that specify the chronological order

in which instructions of concurrent transactions are executed
• A schedule for a set of transactions must consist of all instructions of
those transactions
• Must preserve the order in which the instructions appear in each
individual transaction.
 A transaction that successfully completes its execution will have a commit
instructions as the last statement
• By default transaction assumed to execute commit instruction as its last
step
 A transaction that fails to successfully complete its execution will have an
abort instruction as the last statement

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.11 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Schedule 1

 Let T1 transfer $50 from A to B, and T2 transfer 10% of the balance from
A to B.
 A serial schedule in which T1 is followed by T2 :

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.12 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Schedule 2

 A serial schedule where T2 is followed by T1

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.13 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Schedule 3

 Let T1 and T2 be the transactions defined previously. The following

schedule is not a serial schedule, but it is equivalent to Schedule 1

 In Schedules 1, 2 and 3, the sum A + B is preserved.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.14 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Schedule 4

 The following concurrent schedule does not preserve the value of (A + B ).

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.15 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Serializability

 Basic Assumption – Each transaction preserves database consistency.

 Thus, serial execution of a set of transactions preserves database
consistency.
 A (possibly concurrent) schedule is serializable if it is equivalent to a serial
schedule. Different forms of schedule equivalence give rise to the notions of:
1. Conflict serializability
2. View serializability

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.16 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Simplified view of transactions

 We ignore operations other than read and write instructions

 We assume that transactions may perform arbitrary computations on data in
local buffers in between reads and writes.
 Our simplified schedules consist of only read and write instructions.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.17 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Conflicting Instructions

 Instructions li and lj of transactions Ti and Tj respectively, conflict if and

only if there exists some item Q accessed by both li and lj, and at least one
of these instructions wrote Q.
1. li = read(Q), lj = read(Q). li and lj don’t conflict.
2. li = read(Q), lj = write(Q). They conflict.
3. li = write(Q), lj = read(Q). They conflict
4. li = write(Q), lj = write(Q). They conflict
 Intuitively, a conflict between li and lj forces a (logical) temporal order
between them.
 If li and lj are consecutive in a schedule and they do not conflict, their
results would remain the same even if they had been interchanged in the
schedule.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.18 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Conflict Serializability

 If a schedule S can be transformed into a schedule S’ by a series of swaps

of non-conflicting instructions, we say that S and S’ are conflict
equivalent.
 We say that a schedule S is conflict serializable if it is conflict equivalent
to a serial schedule

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.19 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Conflict Serializability (Cont.)

 Schedule 3 can be transformed into Schedule 6, a serial schedule where T2

follows T1, by series of swaps of non-conflicting instructions. Therefore
Schedule 3 is conflict serializable.

Schedule 3 Schedule 6

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.20 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Conflict Serializability (Cont.)

 Example of a schedule that is not conflict serializable:

 We are unable to swap instructions in the above schedule to obtain either

the serial schedule < T3, T4 >, or the serial schedule < T4, T3 >.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.21 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 View Serializability

 Let S and S’ be two schedules with the same set of transactions. S and S’
are view equivalent if the following three conditions are met, for each data
item Q,
1. If in schedule S, transaction Ti reads the initial value of Q, then in
schedule S’ also transaction Ti must read the initial value of Q.
2. If in schedule S transaction Ti executes read(Q), and that value was
produced by transaction Tj (if any), then in schedule S’ also
transaction Ti must read the value of Q that was produced by the
same write(Q) operation of transaction Tj .
3. The transaction (if any) that performs the final write(Q) operation in
schedule S must also perform the final write(Q) operation in schedule
S’.
 As can be seen, view equivalence is also based purely on reads and writes
alone.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.22 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 View Serializability (Cont.)

 A schedule S is view serializable if it is view equivalent to a serial

schedule.
 Every conflict serializable schedule is also view serializable.
 Below is a schedule which is view-serializable but not conflict serializable.

 What serial schedule is above equivalent to?

 Every view serializable schedule that is not conflict serializable has blind
writes.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.23 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Other Notions of Serializability

 The schedule below produces same outcome as the serial schedule

< T1, T5 >, yet is not conflict equivalent or view equivalent to it.

 Determining such equivalence requires analysis of operations other

than read and write.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.24 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Recoverable Schedules

Need to address the effect of transaction failures on concurrently

running transactions.
 Recoverable schedule — if a transaction Tj reads a data item previously
written by a transaction Ti , then the commit operation of Ti appears before
the commit operation of Tj.
 The following schedule (Schedule 11) is not recoverable

 If T8 should abort, T9 would have read (and possibly shown to the user) an
inconsistent database state. Hence, database must ensure that schedules
are recoverable.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.25 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Cascading Rollbacks

 Cascading rollback – a single transaction failure leads to a series of

transaction rollbacks. Consider the following schedule where none of the
transactions has yet committed (so the schedule is recoverable)

If T10 fails, T11 and T12 must also be rolled back.

 Can lead to the undoing of a significant amount of work

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.26 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Cascadeless Schedules

 Cascadeless schedules — cascading rollbacks cannot occur;

• For each pair of transactions Ti and Tj such that Tj reads a data item
previously written by Ti, the commit operation of Ti appears before the
read operation of Tj.
 Every Cascadeless schedule is also recoverable
 It is desirable to restrict the schedules to those that are cascadeless

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.27 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Concurrency Control

 A database must provide a mechanism that will ensure that all possible
schedules are
• either conflict or view serializable, and
• are recoverable and preferably cascadeless
 A policy in which only one transaction can execute at a time generates
serial schedules, but provides a poor degree of concurrency
• Are serial schedules recoverable/cascadeless?
 Testing a schedule for serializability after it has executed is a little too late!
 Goal – to develop concurrency control protocols that will assure
serializability.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.28 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 Concurrency Control (Cont.)

 Schedules must be conflict or view serializable, and recoverable, for the

sake of database consistency, and preferably cascadeless.
 A policy in which only one transaction can execute at a time generates
serial schedules, but provides a poor degree of concurrency.
 Concurrency-control schemes tradeoff between the amount of concurrency
they allow and the amount of overhead that they incur.
 Some schemes allow only conflict-serializable schedules to be generated,
while others allow view-serializable schedules that are not conflict-
serializable.

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.29 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
 End of Chapter 17

Database System Concepts - 7th Edition 17.30 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan