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314443 : DATABASE MANAGEMENT

SYSTEMS (DBMS)
Unit III

Query Processing and

Database Transactions
Objective

• To understanding the concept of transaction-

‘doing a task in a database’ and its state
• To explore issues in concurrent execution of
transaction
Outline

• Transaction Concept
• Transaction State
• Concurrent Executions
Transaction Concept
• A transaction is a unit of program execution that accesses and
possibly updates various data items.

• Two main issues to deal with:

– Failures of various kinds, such as hardware failures and system
crashes
– Concurrent execution of multiple transactions

• 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)
 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
Required Properties of a transaction

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
Required Properties of a transaction
• 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 consist
Erroneous transaction logic can lead to inconsistency
Required Properties of a transaction
• 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.
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.
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.
Transaction State (Cont.)
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
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
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 :

A B A+B Transaction Remark

100 200 300 @start
50 200 250 T1,WRITE A
50 250 300 T1,WRITE B @COMMIT
45 250 295 T2,WRITE A
45 255 300 T2,WRITE B @COMMIT

consistent
Inconsistent
Schedule 2
• A serial schedule where T2 is followed by T1
A B A+B Transaction Remark
100 200 300 @start
90 200 290 T2,WRITE A
90 210 300 T2,WRITE B @COMMIT
40 210 250 T1,WRITE A
40 260 300 T1,WRITE B @COMMIT

consistent
Inconsistent
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

A B A+B Transaction Remark

100 200 300 @start
50 200 250 T1,WRITE A
45 200 245 T2,WRITE A
45 250 295 T1,WRITE B @COMMIT
45 255 300 T2,WRITE B @COMMIT

consistent
Inconsistent
Inconsistent @Commit
In Schedules 1, 2 and 3, the sum A + B is preserved.
 Schedule 4
• The following concurrent schedule does not
preserve the value of (A + B ).
A B A+B Transaction Remark
100 200 300 @start
90 200 290 T2,WRITE A
90 200 290 T1,WRITE A
90 250 340 T1,WRITE B @COMMIT
90 260 350 T2,WRITE B @COMMIT

consistent
Inconsistent @Transaction
Inconsistent @Commit
Summary
• A task is a database is done as a transaction
that passes through several states.
• Transactions are executed in concurrent
fashion for better throughput.
• Concurrent execution raised Serializability
issues that need to be addressed.
• All schedules may not satisfy ACID properties.
 Thanks !
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Unit III

Query Processing and

Database Transactions
Objective

• To understand the issues that arise when two or more module

transactions work concurrently.
• To introduced the notions of serializability that insure schedules for
transactions that may run in concurrent fashion but still guarantee and
serial behavior.
• To analyze the condition, called conflicts, that need to be honoured to
attain serializable schedules.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Testing for Serializability
• Consider some schedule of a set of transactions T1, T2, ..., Tn
• Precedence graph — a direct graph where the vertices are the
transactions (names).
• We draw an arc from Ti to Tj if the two transaction conflict, and
Ti accessed the data item on which the conflict arose earlier.
• We may label the arc by the item that was accessed.
• Example of a precedence graph
Test for Conflict Serializability
• A schedule is conflict serializable if and only
if its precedence graph is acyclic.
• Cycle-detection algorithms exist which take
order n2 time, where n is the number of
vertices in the graph.
– (Better algorithms take order n + e
where e is the number of edges.)
• If precedence graph is acyclic, the
serializability order can be obtained by a
topological sorting of the graph.
– This is a linear order consistent with the
partial order of the graph.
– For example, a serializability order for
Schedule A would be
T5  T1  T3  T2  T4
• Are there others?
Test for View Serializability
• The precedence graph test for conflict serializability
cannot be used directly to test for view serializability.
– Extension to test for view serializability has cost
exponential in the size of the precedence graph.
• The problem of checking if a schedule is view serializable
falls in the class of NP-complete problems.
– Thus, existence of an efficient algorithm is extremely
unlikely.
• However practical algorithms that just check some
sufficient conditions for view serializability can still be
used.
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 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.
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
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
Summary
• Understood the issues that arise when two or
more transactions work concurrently.
• Learnt the forms of Serializability in term of
conflict and view Serializability
• Acyclic Precedence Graph ensure conflict
Serializability