DBMS Chapter Five IS304

Transaction Management

Contents

1. Transaction Concept
2. Transaction State
3. Concurrent Executions
4. Serializability
5. Recoverability
6. Transaction Definition in SQL

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1. 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:
o Failures of various kinds, such as hardware failures and system
crashes.
o Concurrent execution of multiple transactions.
 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:
o 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

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o 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.
 Consistency requirement in above example:
o The sum of A and B is unchanged by the execution of the transaction
 In general, consistency requirements include:
o Explicitly specified integrity constraints such as primary keys and
foreign keys
o 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, when starting to execute, must see a consistent database.
 During transaction execution the database may be temporarily inconsistent.
 When the transaction completes successfully the database must be consistent
o Erroneous transaction logic can lead to inconsistency
 Isolation requirement — if between steps 3 and 6 (of the fund transfer
transaction), 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).

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 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.
 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 .

2. 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.

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 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:
o Restart the transaction can be done only if no internal logical error
o Kill the transaction
 Committed – after successful completion.

3. 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

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 That is, to control the interaction among the concurrent transactions in

order to prevent them from destroying the consistency of the database

 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
 Let T1 transfer $50 from A to B, and T2 transfer 10% of the balance from A to
B.
 An example (Schedule 1) of a serial schedule in which T1 is followed by T2 :

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 A serial (schedule 2) in which T2 is followed by T1 :

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

(schedule 3) is not a serial schedule, but it is equivalent to Schedule 1.

 Note -- In schedules 1, 2 and 3, the sum “A + B” is preserved.

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 The following concurrent (schedule 4) does not preserve the sum of “A + B”

4. 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
 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.
 Let li and lj be two Instructions of transactions Ti and Tj respectively.
Instructions li and lj 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.

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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.
o 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.

 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

 Schedule 3 can be transformed into Schedule 6 -- a serial schedule where T2

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

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 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 >.
 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

 A schedule is conflict serializable if and only if its precedence graph is acyclic.

o 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.)

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o If precedence graph is acyclic, the serializability order can be obtained by a

topological sorting of the graph. That is, a linear order consistent with the
partial order of the graph.
o For example, a serializability order for the schedule (a) would be one of either
(b) or (c)

5. Recoverability
 Recoverable schedule — if a transaction Tj reads a data item previously written
by a transaction Ti , then the commit operation of Ti must appear before the
commit operation of Tj.
 The following schedule is not recoverable if T9 commits immediately after the
read(A) operation.

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 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 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: 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.
 Example of a schedule that is NOT cascadeless.

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 A database must provide a mechanism that will ensure that all possible
schedules are both:
o Conflict serializable.
o 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
 Concurrency-control schemes tradeoff between the amount of concurrency they
allow and the amount of overhead that they incur
 Testing a schedule for serializability after it has executed is a little too late!
Tests for serializability help us understand why a concurrency control protocol
is correct.
 Goal – to develop concurrency control protocols that will assure
serializability.
 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

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 E.g., database statistics computed for query optimization can be approximate

(why?)
 Such transactions need not be serializable with respect to other transactions
 Level Levels of Consistency in SQL
 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, but
successive reads of record may return different (but committed)
values.
 Read uncommitted — even uncommitted records may be read.
 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 by default support a level of consistency
called snapshot isolation (not part of the SQL standard)

6. Transaction Definition in SQL

 Data manipulation language must include a construct for specifying the set of
actions that comprise a transaction.
 In SQL, a transaction begins implicitly.
 A transaction in SQL ends by: Commit work commits current transaction and
begins a new one.

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 Rollback work causes current transaction to abort.

 In almost all database systems, by default, every SQL statement also commits
implicitly if it executes successfully.
o Implicit commit can be turned off by a database directive E.g. in
MySQL, set autocommit=0;

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