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66 Transaction

The document defines transactions in relational databases, including the need for transactions, syntax to start and commit or rollback transactions, and locking. Transactions allow grouping SQL statements atomically to succeed or have no effect. Storage engines like InnoDB support row-level locking and transactions while MyISAM uses whole-table locking without transactions.

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Krishna
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7 views

66 Transaction

The document defines transactions in relational databases, including the need for transactions, syntax to start and commit or rollback transactions, and locking. Transactions allow grouping SQL statements atomically to succeed or have no effect. Storage engines like InnoDB support row-level locking and transactions while MyISAM uses whole-table locking without transactions.

Uploaded by

Krishna
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Transaction

This lesson defines and explains the concept of a transaction in the context of relational
databases.

We'll cover the following

• Need for Transactions

• Syntax to Start & Commit a Transaction

• Syntax to Start & Rollback a Transaction

• Locking

Transaction

A common online definition of a database transaction reads "A transaction


symbolizes a unit of work performed within a database management system
against a database, and treated in a coherent and reliable way independent of
other transactions." In simpler terms, think about taking a two-legged flight
from Mumbai to New York. The first airline takes you from Mumbai to Dubai
and the second takes you from Dubai to New York. The two flight legs
represent portions of a transaction. You must travel both legs to reach your
destination, but if immigration forbids you from taking the second leg of the
flight you'd want to return back to Mumbai and not remain stranded at Dubai.
A database transaction is similar. You either want all the actions within the
transaction to complete or none at all. You don't want a transaction to
complete halfway through and then abort.

Need for Transactions #

One may wonder why we need transactions. Well, whenever multiple users
are interacting with a database it is possible for the actions of one user to
interleave with another user and bring the data in an inconsistent state. The

classic example is transferring funds from one bank account to another. Say
the bank application wants to add 100 dollars to your bank account with a
balance of 500 dollars. The application reads your balance, adds 100 dollars to
it and then updates the new amount 600 dollars in the database against your
username. It could happen that between the time the application reads and
updates the new amount, you make an ATM withdrawal of 200 dollars. The
application has already read your balance and doesn't know that 200 dollars
has been withdrawn and mistakenly writes your balance as 600 dollars to the
database.

The application layer could avoid this mistake if it performed the two tasks of
reading and then updating your balance atomically, or in other words as a
transaction. Transactions allow you to batch together SQL statements as an
indivisible set that either succeeds or has no effect on the database.

Syntax to Start & Commit a Transaction #

START TRANSACTION;

** – SQL statements

COMMIT;

Syntax to Start & Rollback a Transaction #

START TRANSACTION;

** – SQL statements

ROLLBACK;

Connect to the terminal below by clicking in the widget. Once connected, the
command line prompt will show up. Enter or copy and paste the command
./DataJek/Lessons/39lesson.sh and wait for the MySQL prompt to start-up.
-- The lesson queries are reproduced below for convenient copy/paste into the terminal.

-- Query 1
START TRANSACTION;
UPDATE Actors
SET Id = 100
WHERE FirstName = "Brad";
COMMIT;

-- Query 2
START TRANSACTION;
UPDATE Actors
SET Id = 200
WHERE FirstName = "Tom";
ROLLBACK;

-- Query 3
SHOW ENGINES;

Terminal

1. MySQL operates in AUTOCOMMIT mode so whatever commands we issue


at the MySQL prompt are committed and treated as a transaction.
However, we can explicitly start a transaction and then either proceed to
commit it or roll it back. Consider the following sequence of commands:

START TRANSACTION;

UPDATE Actors
SET Id = 100
WHERE FirstName = "Brad";

COMMIT;
2. Now we'll start a transaction but roll it back midway and observe the
changes that don't take place.

START TRANSACTION;

UPDATE Actors
SET Id = 200
WHERE FirstName = "Tom";

ROLLBACK;
You can observe from the screenshot that once we roll back the
transaction, the changes we intended don't take place.

Locking #

Transactions are important so that users don't step on each other's feet when
interacting with the database. The database system has to block other
transactions from executing while another is in progress and targets the same
tables. Also, there are some storage engines that don't support transactions.
Irrespective of whether transactions are supported or not, the database system
has to implement some sort of a locking mechanism to protect tables from
being modified by multiple users at the same time. There are various levels of
sophistication built into database engines on how to handle concurrent users.
For instance, in the case of MyISAM, the entire table gets locked, while InnoDB
provides granular locking at the row level. You can view all the available types
of storage engines on your version of MySQL as follows:

SHOW ENGINES;
As you can observe from the output there are nine types of database engines
available and by default, tables get created as InnoDB type. You can also see
from the output which engines support transactions and which don't. MyISAM
doesn't support transactions that InnoDB does. There are pros and cons of
using each type. InnoDB supports fine-grained locking at the cost of slower
performance but allows multiple users to make modifications to a table at the
same time. On the other hand, MyISAM places whole-table locks to handle
multiple users which is simpler and faster but reduces concurrency. We'll end
our general discussion on transactions and locking here but there are many
other nuances to this topic that are out of scope for an introductory course on
MySQL. The takeaway is to be cognizant that the type of storage engine you
choose for your tables has consequences on the performance of your overall
application. As the number of users of your application increase you'll need to
use more sophisticated storage engines that are used to handle the high
concurrent load.

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