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.

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 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

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 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.

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 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

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 Transaction State (Cont.)

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 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.

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 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

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 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 :

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 Schedule 2

▪ A serial schedule where T2 is followed by T1

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 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 .

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 Schedule 4

▪ The following concurrent schedule does not preserve the value of (A

+ B ).

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 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

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 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.

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 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.

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 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

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 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 Schedule
3 6

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 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 >.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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

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 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?

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 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.

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 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.

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 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

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 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

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 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.

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 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.

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 Concurrency Control vs. Serializability
Tests

▪ Concurrency-control protocols allow concurrent schedules, but

ensure that the schedules are conflict/view serializable, and are
recoverable and cascadeless .
▪ Concurrency control protocols (generally) do not examine the
precedence graph as it is being created
• Instead a protocol imposes a discipline that avoids non-
serializable schedules.
• We study such protocols in Chapter 16.
▪ Different concurrency control protocols provide different tradeoffs
between the amount of concurrency they allow and the amount of
overhead that they incur.
▪ Tests for serializability help us understand why a concurrency
control protocol is correct.

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 Weak Levels of Consistency

▪ Some applications are willing to live with weak levels of

consistency, allowing schedules that are not serializable
• E.g., a read-only transaction that wants to get an approximate
total balance of all accounts
• E.g., database statistics computed for query optimization can
be approximate (why?)
• Such transactions need not be serializable with respect to
other transactions
▪ Tradeoff accuracy for performance

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 Levels of Consistency in SQL-92

▪ Serializable — default
▪ Repeatable read — only committed records to be read.
• Repeated reads of same record must return same value.
• However, a transaction may not be serializable – it may find
some records inserted by a transaction but not find others.
▪ Read committed — only committed records can be read.
• Successive reads of record may return different (but
committed) values.
▪ Read uncommitted — even uncommitted records may be read.

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 Levels of Consistency

▪ Lower degrees of consistency useful for gathering approximate

information about the database
▪ Warning: some database systems do not ensure serializable
schedules by default
▪ E.g., Oracle (and PostgreSQL prior to version 9) by default support
a level of consistency called snapshot isolation (not part of the
SQL standard)

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 Transaction Definition in SQL

▪ In SQL, a transaction begins implicitly.

▪ A transaction in SQL ends by:
• Commit work commits current transaction and begins a new
one.
• Rollback work causes current transaction to abort.
▪ In almost all database systems, by default, every SQL statement
also commits implicitly if it executes successfully
• Implicit commit can be turned off by a database directive
▪ E.g., in JDBC -- connection.setAutoCommit(false);
▪ Isolation level can be set at database level
▪ Isolation level can be changed at start of transaction
▪ E.g. In SQL set transaction isolation level serializable
▪ E.g. in JDBC -- connection.setTransactionIsolation(

Connection.TRANSACTION_SERIALIZABLE)

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 Implementation of Isolation Levels

▪ Locking
• Lock on whole database vs lock on items
• How long to hold lock?
• Shared vs exclusive locks
▪ Timestamps
• Transaction timestamp assigned e.g. when a transaction
begins
• Data items store two timestamps
▪ Read timestamp
▪ Write timestamp
• Timestamps are used to detect out of order accesses
▪ Multiple versions of each data item
• Allow transactions to read from a “snapshot” of the database

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 Transactions as SQL Statements
▪ E.g., Transaction 1:
select ID, name from instructor where salary > 90000
▪ E.g., Transaction 2:
insert into instructor values ('11111', 'James', 'Marketing',
100000)
▪ Suppose
• T1 starts, finds tuples salary > 90000 using index and locks them
• And then T2 executes.
• Do T1 and T2 conflict? Does tuple level locking detect the
conflict?
• Instance of the phantom phenomenon
▪ Also consider T3 below, with Wu’s salary = 90000
update instructor
set salary = salary * 1.1
where name = 'Wu’
▪ Key idea: Detect “predicate” conflicts, and use some form of
“predicate locking”

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 End of Chapter 17

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