UNIT - 4

Transactions
● Transaction Concept
● Transaction State
● Concurrent Executions
● Serializability
● Recoverability
● Concurrency Control
Transaction Concept
● A transaction is a collection of operations that
perform a single unit of work.
● A transaction is a unit of program execution that
accesses and possibly updates various data items.
● E.g. transaction to transfer Rs 100 from account A to
account B:
● Two main issues to deal with:
● Failures of various kinds, such as hardware failures
and system crashes
● Concurrent execution of multiple transactions
Example of Fund Transfer
● Transaction to transfer Rs100 from account A to account B:

1. read(A)
2. A := A – 100
3. write(A)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 100
6. write(B)

read(X)-> transfers data item X from DB to local buffer of

the transaction.
write(X)-> transfers data item X from local buffer of the
transaction to DB.
Example of Fund Transfer
● 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 Rs 100 has taken place), the updates to
the database by the transaction must persist even if
there are system failures.
Example of Fund Transfer
● Consistency requirement in above example:
● The sum of A and B is unchanged by the execution of the
transaction
● 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
Example of Fund Transfer
● 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.
ACID Properties
To preserve the integrity and consistency 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.
Transaction States
● Active – the initial state; the transaction stays in this
state during the execution.
● Partially committed – after the final statement has
been executed. (Before Commit )
● 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 States
Implementation of Atomicity and Durability
● The recovery-manager of a database system implements the Atomicity and
durability.
● E.g. the shadow-copy scheme:
● In this scheme a transaction that wants to update the DB first creates a
complete copy of the DB.
● All updates are made on the new database copy leaving the original copy called the
shadow copy untouched.
● If at any point the transaction has to be aborted, the New copy is merely deleted.
● The old copy of the DB has not been affected.
Implementation of Atomicity and Durability
● db_pointer always points to the current consistent copy of
the database.
● In case transaction fails, old consistent copy pointed by
db_pointer can be used, and the new copy can be deleted.
● The shadow-database scheme:
● Assumes that only one transaction is active at a time.
● Assumes disks do not fail
● Useful for text editors, but
● extremely inefficient for large databases
● Variant called shadow paging reduces copying of data, but is still
not practical for large databases
● Can not handle concurrent transactions
Concurrent Executions
● Multiple transactions are allowed to run
concurrently in the system. Advantages are:
● Increased CPU 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 sequence of instructions that specify the
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 Rs 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 :
Schedule 2
• A serial schedule where T2 is followed by T1
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.

Schedule 4
● The following concurrent schedule does not
preserve the value of (A + B ).
Serializability
● Basic Assumption – Each transaction preserves database
consistency.
● Thus serial execution of a set of transactions preserves
database consistency.
● A 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 write 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
● 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
● 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
Conflict Serializability
● 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 >.
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 that performs the final write(Q)
operation in schedule S must also perform the final
write(Q) operation in schedule S’.
View Serializability
● 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.
Recoverable Schedules
● 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 T9
commits immediately after the read

● 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.
Recoverable Schedules
● A recoverable schedule is one where, 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 commit operation of Tj .

● Recoverability addresses the effect of transaction

failures on concurrently running transactions.
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;
● A cascadeless schedule is one where, 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
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
● Goal – to develop concurrency control protocols that
will assure serializability.
THANK YOU