Advanced Database Systems

Chapter 2
Transaction Processing Concepts

Sirage Z.
Department of Computer Science
Debre Berhan University
2022
 What is a transaction?
 A Transaction is a mechanism for applying the desired
modifications/operations to a database.
 Action, or series of actions, carried out by a single user or
application program, which accesses or changes contents of
database. (i.e. Logical unit of work on the database.)
 A transaction could be a whole program, part/module of a
program or a single command.
 Changes made in real time to a database are called transactions.
 Examples include ATM transactions, credit card approvals, flight
reservations, hotel check-in, phone calls, supermarket canning,
academic registration and billing.
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 …Con’t
 A transaction could be composed of one or more
database and non-database operations.
 Transforms database from one consistent state to
another, although consistency may be violated during
transaction.
 A database transaction is a unit of interaction with
database management system or similar system that
is treated in a coherent and reliable way independent
of other transactions.
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 Transaction Processing System
 A system that manages transactions and controls their access to a DBMS
is called a TP monitor.
 A transaction processing system (TPS) generally consists of a TP monitor,
one or more DBMSs, and a set of application programs containing
transaction.
 In database field, a transaction is a group of logical operations that must
all succeed or fail as a group.
 Systems dedicated to supporting such operations are known as
transaction processing systems.

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 …con’t
 Distinction between business transactions and online
transactions:
 A business transaction is an interaction in the real world, usually between
an enterprise and a person, where something is exchanged. Example :
market
 An online transaction is the execution of a program that performs an
administrative or real-time function, often by accessing shared data
sources, usually on behalf of an online user (although some transactions
are run offline in batch).

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 …con’t
 Transactions can be started, attempted, then committed or aborted via data
manipulation commands of SQL.
 Can have one of the two outcomes for any transaction:
 Success - transaction commits and database reaches a new consistent
state
> Committed transaction cannot be aborted or rolled back.
 Failure - transaction aborts, and database must be restored to
consistent state before it started.
 Such a transaction is rolled back or undone.
 Aborted transaction that is rolled back can be restarted later.

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 …con’t
 The DBMS has no inherent way of knowing the logical grouping of operations that
are supposed to be done together.
 Hence, it must provide the users a means to logically group their operations.
 Key words such as BEGIN TRANSACTION, COMMIT and ROLLBACK (or their
equivalents) are available in many data manipulation languages to delimit
transactions.
 A single transaction might require several queries, each reading and/or writing
information in the database.
 When this happens it is usually important to be sure that the database is not left
with only some of the queries carried out.
 For example, when doing a money transfer, if the money was debited from one
account, it is important that it also be credited to the depositing account.
 Also, transactions should not interfere with each other
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 Properties of Transaction
 A transaction is expected to exhibit some basic features or properties to be
considered as a valid transaction.
 These features are:
> A: Atomicity
> C: Consistency
> I: Isolation
> D: Durability
 It is referred to as ACID property of a transaction.
 Without the ACID property, the integrity of the database cannot be
guaranteed.

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 Atomicity
 Is All or None property
 Every transaction should be considered as an atomic process which
cannot be sub divided into small tasks.
 Due to this property, just like an atom which exists or does not
exist, a transaction has only two states.
> Done or Never Started.
> Done - a transaction must complete successfully and its effect
should be visible in the database.
> Never Started - If a transaction fails during execution then all its
modifications must be undone to bring back the database to the
last consistent state, i.e., remove the effect of failed transaction.
 No state between Done and Never Started
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 Consistency
 If the transaction code is correct then a transaction, at the end of its
execution, must leave the database consistent.
 A transaction should transform a database from one previous consistent
state to another consistent state.
Isolation
 A transaction must execute without interference from other concurrent
transactions and its intermediate or partial modifications to data must not
be visible to other transactions.

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 Durability
 The effect of a completed transaction must persist in the
database,
i.e., its updates must be available to other transaction
immediately after the end of its execution, and is should
not be affected due to failures after the completion of
the transaction.
 In practice, these properties are often relaxed somewhat
to provide better performance.

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 Transaction Support
 No explicit Begin Transaction statement
 Transaction initiation is done implicitly when particular SQL statements are encountered.
 Every transaction must have an explicit end statement
 COMMIT
 ROLLBACK
 Every transaction has certain characteristics attributed to it.
 These characteristics are specified by a SET TRANSACTION statement in SQL.
 The characteristics are
 the access mode
 the diagnostic area size
 the isolation level.
 Access mode is READ ONLY or READ WRITE
 Diagnostic area size option
 Integer value indicating number of conditions held simultaneously in the diagnostic area
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 Transaction Support …con’t
 Isolation level option
 Dirty read
 Nonrepeatable read
 Phantoms
 Dirty read A transaction T1 may read the update of a transaction T2, which has
not yet committed. If T2 fails and is aborted, then T1 would have read a value that
does not exist and is incorrect.
 Nonrepeatable read transaction T1 may read a given value from a table. If another
transaction T2 later updates that value and T1 reads that value again, T1 will see a
different value.
 Phantoms A transaction T1 may read a set of rows from a table, perhaps based on
some condition specified in the SQL WHERE-clause. Now suppose that a
transaction T2 inserts a new row that also satisfies the WHERE-clause condition
used in T1, into the table used by T1. If T1 is repeated, then T1 will see a phantom,
a row that previously did not exist.
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 …con’t
 The transaction sub system of a DBMS is depicted in the following.

of the DBMS
Fig. the transaction sub system

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 Transaction and System Concepts
 System must keep track of when each transaction starts,
terminates, commits, and/or aborts
 BEGIN_TRANSACTION
 READ or WRITE
 END_TRANSACTION
 COMMIT_TRANSACTION
 ROLLBACK (or ABORT)

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Transaction and System Concepts (cont’d.)

Figure 2.4 State transition diagram illustrating

the states for transaction execution

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 State of a Transaction
 A transaction is an atomic operation from the users’ perspective.
But it has a collection of operations and it can have a number of
states during its execution.
 A transaction can end in three possible ways.
1. Successful Termination: when a transaction completes the execution of all
operations in it and reaches the COMMIT command.
2. Suicidal Termination: when the transaction detects an error during its
processing and decide to quick itself before the end of the transaction and
perform a ROLL BACK
3. Murderous Termination: When the DBMS or the system force the
execution to abort for any reason. And hence, rolled back.

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 Ways of Transaction Execution
 There are two ways of executing a set of transactions:
 (a) Serially: Serial Execution: In a serial execution transactions are executed strictly serially.
> Thus, Transaction Ti completes and writes its results to the database then only
the next transaction Tj is scheduled for execution.
> This means at one time there is only one transaction is being executed in the
system.
> The data is not shared between transactions at one specific time.

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 ...con’t
 In Serial transaction execution, one transaction being executed
does not interfere the execution of any other transaction.
 Good things about serial execution
 Correct execution, i.e., if the input is correct then output will be correct.
 Fast execution, since all the resources are available to the active.
 The worst thing about serial execution is very inefficient resource utilization. i.e. reduced parallelism.

 Notations:
> Read(x) read data item x from database
> Write(x) write data item x into the database

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 …con’t
 Example of a serial execution
 Suppose data items X = 10, Y = 6, and N =1 and T 1 and T2 are transactions.
Time T1 T2
T1 T2 read (X) {X =
read (X) read (X) 10}
X := X+N {X =
X := X+N X := X+N
11}
write (X) write (X) write (X) {X =
read (Y) 11}
Y := Y+N read (Y) {Y =
write (Y) 6}
Y := Y+N {Y =
7}
write (Y) {Y =
7}
read (X) {X =
11}
X := X+N {X =
 Final values of X, Y at the end of T1 and T2: 12}
 X = 12 and Y = 7. write (X)

 Thus in serial execution of transaction, if we have two transactions T i and Ti+1, then Ti+1 will only be executed
after the completion of Ti.
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 …con’t
 (b) Concurrently: is the reverse of serially executable transactions,
 In this scheme the individual operations of transactions, i.e., reads and writes are interleaved in some
order.
Time T1 T2
read (X) {X = 10}
read (X) {X = 10}
X := X+N {X = 11}
X := X+N {X = 11}
write (X) {X = 11}
write (X) (X=11)
read (Y) {Y = 6}
Y := Y+N {Y = 7}
write (Y) {Y = 7}

 Final values at the end of T1 and T2: X = 11, and Y = 7.

 This improves resource utilization, unfortunately gives incorrect result.
 The correct value of X is 12 but in concurrent execution X =11, which is incorrect.
 The reason for this error is incorrect sharing of X by T1 and T2.
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 …con’t
 In serial execution
 T2 read the value of X written by T1 (i.e., 11)
 In concurrent execution
 T2 read the same value of X (i.e., 10) as T1 did and the update made by T1 was
overwritten by T2’s update.
 This is the reason the final value of X is one less than what is produced by serial
execution.
 But, why concurrent execution? Reasons:
 Many systems have an independent component to handle I/O like DMA (Direct
Memory Access) module.
 CPU may process other transactions while one is in I/O operation
 Improves resource utilization
 Increases the throughput of the system.
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Problems Associated with Concurrent Transaction
Processing
 Two transactions may be correct when inserting of operations may produce an incorrect result
which needs control over access.
 Having a concurrent transaction processing, one can enhance the throughput of the system.
 As reading and writing is performed from and on secondary storage, the system will not be idle
during these operations if there is a concurrent processing.
 Every transaction is correct when executed alone.
 The three potential problems caused by concurrency are:
> Lost Update Problem
> Uncommitted Dependency Problem
> Inconsistent Analysis Problem.

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 Lost Update Problem
 Successfully completed update on a data set by one transaction is
overridden by another transaction/user.
 E.g. Account with balance A=100.
> T1 reads the account A
> T1 withdraws 10 from A
> T1 makes the update in the Database
> T2 reads the account A
> T2 adds 100 on A
> T2 makes the update in the Database
 In the above case, if done one after the other (serially) then we have no problem.
 If the execution is T1 followed by T2 then A=190
 If the execution is T2 followed by T1 then A=190
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 …con’t
 But if they start at the same time in the following sequence:
 T1 reads the account A=100
 T1 withdraws 10 making the balance A=90
 T2 reads the account A=100
 T2 adds 100 making A=200
 T1 makes the update in the Database A=90
 T2 makes the update in the Database A=200
 After the successful completion of the operation in this schedule,
the final value of A will be 200 which override the update made by
the first transaction that changed the value from 100 to 90.

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 Uncommitted Dependency Problem
 Occurs when one transaction can see intermediate results of
another transaction before it is committed.
 E.g.
 T2 increases 100 making it 200 but then aborts the transaction before it
is committed.
 T1 gets 200, subtracts 10 and make it 190. But the actual balance should
be 90

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 Inconsistent Analysis Problem
 Occurs when transaction reads several values but second transaction updates some of
them during execution and before the completion of the first.

 As discussed above, the objective of Concurrency Control Protocol is to schedule

transactions in such a way as to avoid any interference between them.
 This demands a new principle in transaction processing, which is serializability of the
schedule of execution of multiple transactions.
 Related with the inconsistent analysis problem we have the phantom read and the
fuzzy(unclear) read problems

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 Serializability
 In any transaction processing system, if concurrent processing is
implemented, there will be concept called schedule having or
determining the execution sequence of operations in different
transactions.
 Schedule: time-ordered sequence of the important actions taken
by one or more transitions.
 Schedule represents the order in which instructions are executed in the system in
chronological ordering.
 The scheduler component of a DBMS must ensure that the individual steps of
different transactions preserve consistency.

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 …con’t
 1) Serial Schedule: a schedule where the operations of each transaction are
executed consecutively without any interleaved operations from other transactions.
 2) Non-serial Schedule: Schedule where operations from a set of concurrent
transactions are interleaved.
> The objective of serializability is to find non-serial schedules that
allow transactions to execute concurrently without interfering with
one another.
 If a non serial schedule can come up with a result equivalent to some serial schedule,
we call the schedule Serializable.
 Sequence of the execution of the operations will result in a value identical with serially
executed transaction, which always is correct.
 Serializability identifies those concurrent executions of transactions guaranteed to
ensure consistency.

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 Serialization
 Objective of serialization is to find schedules that allow
transactions to execute concurrently without interfering with one
another.
 If two transactions only read data, order is not important.
 If two transactions either read or write completely separate data
items, they do not conflict and order is not important.
 If one transaction writes a data item and another reads or writes
the same data item, order of execution is important
 Possible solution: Run all transactions serially.
 This is often too restrictive as it limits degree of concurrency or
parallelism in system.
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 Test for Serializability
 Constrained write rule: transaction updates data item based on its old
value, which is first read by the transaction.
 Under the constrained write rule we can use precedence graph to test for
serializability.
 A non serial schedule can be tasted for serializability by using a method called
precedence graph.
 A precedence graph is composed of:
 Nodes to represent the transactions, and
 Arc(directed edge) to connect nodes indicating the order of execution for
the transactions
 So that the directed edge TiTj implies, in an equivalent serial execution Ti
must be executed before Tj.
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 The rules of precedence graph:
 Represent each transaction in the schedule with a node.
 Then draw a directed arc from Ti to Tj (that is Ti to Tj ) if:
1. Tj Reads an item that is already Written by Ti
> Ti Write(x) Then Tj Read(x)
2. Tj Writes an item that already has been Read by Ti, or
> Ti Read(x) Then Tj Write(x)
3. Tj Writes an item that already has been Written by Ti
> Ti Write(x) Then Tj Write(x)
 After drawing the precedence graph, if there is any cycle in the graph, the
schedule is said to be Non Serializable.
 Otherwise, if there is no cycle in the graph, the schedule is equivalent with
some serial schedule and is serializable
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 Figure 2.5 Examples of serial and nonserial schedules involving transactions T1 and
T2 (a) Serial schedule A: T1 followed by T2 (b) Serial schedule B: T2 followed by T1
(c) Two nonserial schedules C and D with interleaving of operations
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 Characterizing Schedules Based on
Serializability
 Testing for serializability of a schedule

Algorithm 2.1 Testing conflict serializability of a schedule S

Characterizing Schedules Based on
Serializability (cont’d.)

Figure 2.7 Constructing the precedence graphs for schedules A to D from Figure 20.5 to
test for conflict serializability (a) Precedence graph for serial schedule A (b) Precedence
graph for serial schedule B (c) Precedence graph for schedule C (not serializable) (d)
Precedence graph for schedule D (serializable, equivalent to schedule A)
 Exercise
Ex1:
R1(x) W2(x) W1(x)
Check: T1T2 and T2T1
Ex2:
R1(x)W2(x)W1(x)W3(x)
Check: T1T2, T2T1, T2T3, T3T2, T1T3, and T3T1

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