Unit-V

TRANSACTION MANAGEMENT

1. Transaction concept & Transaction States

2. Implementation of atomicity and durability
3. Serializability
4. Recoverability
5. Implementation of isolation
 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) // reading a data item A
2. A := A – 50 // deducting 50 from data item A
3. write(A) // Updating data item A in the database
4. read(B) // reading data item B
5. B := B + 50 // adding 50 to data item B
6. write(B) // updating data item B in the database
• Two main issues to deal with:
– Failures of various kinds, such as hardware failures
and system crashes
– Concurrent execution of multiple transactions

Slide No.L1-1
 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.

Slide No.L1-2
 Example of Fund Transfer (Cont.)
• 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)
• 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

Slide No.L1-3
 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.

Slide No.L1-4
 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.

Slide No.L1-5
 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.

Slide No.L1-6
Transaction State (Cont.)

Slide No.L1-7
 Implementation of Atomicity and Durability
• The recovery-management component of a database system
implements the support for atomicity and durability.
• E.g. the shadow-database scheme:
– all updates are made on a shadow copy of the database
• db_pointer is made to point to the updated shadow
copy after
– the transaction reaches partial commit and
– all updated pages have been flushed to disk.

Slide No.L2-1
 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

Slide No.L2-3
 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

Slide No.L2-4
 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 :

Slide No.L2-5
 Schedule 2
• A serial schedule where T2 is followed by T1

Slide No.L2-6
 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.

Slide No.L2-7
 Schedule 4
• The following concurrent schedule does not preserve
the value of (A + B ).

Slide No.L2-8
 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.

Slide No.L3-1
 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.

Slide No.L3-2
 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

Slide No.L3-3
 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
Slide No.L3-4
 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 >.

Slide No.L3-5
 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.

Slide No.L3-6
Precedence Graph
 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.

Slide No.L3-7
 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
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.

Slide No.L4-1
 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

Slide No.L4-2
 Implementation of Isolation
• 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.

Slide No.L5-1
Figure 15.6

Slide No.L5-2
 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 1
x

Slide No.L5-3
Precedence Graph
 Example Schedule (Schedule A) + Precedence Graph

T1 T2 T3 T4 T5
read(X)
read(Y)
read(Z)
read(V)
read(W) T T
read(W)
read(Y) 1 2
write(Y)
write(Z)
read(U)
read(Y)
write(Y) T T
read(Z)
4
write(Z) 3
read(U)
write(U)
T
5

Slide No.L5-4