Chapter 15: Transactions

Transaction Concept
● A transaction is a unit of program execution that accesses and possibly
updates various data items.
● A transaction must see a consistent database.
● During transaction execution the database may be temporarily inconsistent.
● When the transaction completes successfully (is committed), the database must
be consistent.
● After a transaction commits, the changes it has made to the database persist,
even if there are system failures.
● Multiple transactions can execute in parallel.
● Two main issues to deal with:
● Failures of various kinds, such as hardware failures and system crashes
● Concurrent execution of multiple transactions
 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.
 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,
the system should ensure that its updates are not reflected in the database, else an
inconsistency will result.
● Consistency requirement – the sum of A and B is unchanged by the execution of
the transaction.
 Example of Fund Transfer (Cont.)
● Isolation requirement — if between steps 3 and 6, another transaction 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).
● Isolation can be ensured trivially by running transactions serially, that is one
after the other.
● However, executing multiple transactions concurrently has significant benefits
● 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 despite failures.
 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.
Transaction State (Cont.)
Implementation of Atomicity and Durability
● The recovery-management component of a database system implements
the support for atomicity and durability.
● The shadow-database scheme:
● assume that only one transaction is active at a time.
● a pointer called db_pointer always points to the current consistent
copy of the database.
● all updates are made on a shadow copy of the database, and db_pointer
is made to point to the updated shadow copy only after the transaction
reaches partial commit and all updated pages have been flushed to disk.
● in case transaction fails, old consistent copy pointed to by db_pointer
can be used, and the shadow copy can be deleted.
 Implementation of Atomicity and Durability (Cont.)
The shadow-database scheme:

● Assumes disks do not fail

● Useful for text editors, but
● extremely inefficient for large databases because does not handle
concurrent transactions
 Concurrent Executions
● Multiple transactions are allowed to run concurrently in the system. Advantages
are:
● increased processor and disk utilization, leading to better transaction
throughput: 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 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 (will be omitted if it is obvious)
● A transaction that fails to successfully complete its execution will have an abort
instructions as the last statement (will be omitted if it is obvious)
 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:
 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 (not equivalent to schedule 1)
● 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 (possibly concurrent) schedule is serializable if it is equivalent to a serial
schedule. Different forms of schedule equivalence generate different ideas of
serializability. conflict serializability is one of them.
● We ignore operations other than read and write instructions, and 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 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
 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 (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
 Conflict Serializability (Cont.)
● Example of a schedule that is NOT conflict serializable because we can’t
swap the instructions:

● We are unable to swap instructions in the above schedule to

obtain either the serial schedule < T3, T4 >, or the serial
schedule < T4, T3 >.
 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

y
Example Schedule (Schedule A) + Precedence Graph
 Test for Conflict Serializability
● A schedule is conflict serializable if and only if
its precedence graph is acyclic (which doesn’t
cycles (loops)).
● 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, one of the serializability order for
Schedule A would be
T5 → T1 → T3 → T2 → T4
(Can you identify another one?)
 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 should appear before
the commit operation of Tj.
● The following schedule 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.
 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; 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.
 Concurrency Control
● A database must provide a mechanism that will ensure that all possible schedules are
● either conflict or view serializable (view serializability is not covered in this
PPT), 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.
End of Chapter