Transactions

Transaction
 A transaction can be defined as a group of tasks. A single task is the
minimum processing unit of work, which cannot be divided further..
 A transaction must see a consistent database.
 During transaction execution the database may be inconsistent.
 When the transaction is committed, the database must be consistent.
ACID Properties
To ensure integrity of data, the database system must maintain:
 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.
 That is, for every pair of transactions T and T , it appears to T that
i j i
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.
Demonstrating ACID

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: total value A+B, unchanged by action

Atomicity: if action fails after 3 and before 6, 3 should not affect db

Durability: once user notified of action commit, updates to A,B should

not be undone by system failure
Isolation: other actions should not be able to see A, B between steps 3-6
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.
1) Restart the transaction – only if no internal logical error
2) kill the transaction
 Committed, after successful completion..
State diagram of a transaction
Atomicity and Durability

 Atomicity deals with these failures:

 User aborts transaction (e.g., cancel button)
 System aborts transaction (e.g., deadlock)
 Transaction aborts itself (e.g., unexpected db
state)
 System crashes
 Durability deals with this type of failure:
 Media failure
 Log

Append-only sequence of records used to restore

database to a consistent state after a failure.
Stored on non-volatile device physically separate
from the mass storage device that contains
database
Recovery From Crash

 Crash:
 Active transactions must be identified and aborted
when system recovers
 Commit and Abort Records identify completed
transactions. If, during a backward log scan, the first
record encountered for T is an update record, then T
was active at time of crash and must be rolled back
Continue
Checkpoints

 After a failure, we may not know how far back in the

log to search for redo of transactions
 Can limit log searching using checkpoints
 Scheduled at predetermined intervals
 Checkpoint operations:
 Write modified blocks in the database buffers to disk
 Write a checkpoint record to the log-contains the
names of all transactions that are active at the time
of the checkpoint
 Write all log records now in main memory out to disk
shadow-database scheme
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.
Cont.
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 waiting time for transactions: short

transactions need not wait behind long ones.

Schedules
 Schedules – sequences that indicate 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.
Example Schedules
 Let T1 transfer $50 from A to B, and T2 transfer 10% of the balance
from A to B. The following is a serial schedule (Schedule 1 in the
text), in which T1 is followed by T2.
Cont.
 Let T1 and T2 be the transactions defined previously. The following
schedule is not a serial schedule, but it is equivalent to Schedule 1.
Cont.
 The following concurrent schedule does not preserve the value of the
the sum A + B.
Some definitions
 Schedule: Time ordered sequence of the actions
taken by one or more transactions
 Serial schedule: A schedule that considers all the
actions of a transaction T1, followed by all the
actions of another transaction T2 and so on.
 Serializable schedule: A schedule whose effect on the
state of the Database is the same as the effect of
some serial schedule. All serial schedules are
serialisable but not all serializable schedules are
serial!
 Conflict: A pair of consecutive database actions
(reads, writes) is in conflict if changing their order
would change the result of at least one of the
transactions.
 Conflict equivalence: Two schedules are conflict-
equivalent if they can be turned into one another by
a sequence of non conflicting swaps of adjacent
actions
 Conflict serializability: A schedule is conflict
serializable if it is conflict equivalent to a serial
schedule
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
Conflict Serializability
 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 (Cont.)
 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
 Example of a schedule that is not conflict serializable:
T3 T4
read(Q)
write(Q)
write(Q)

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

either the serial schedule < T3, T4 >, or the serial schedule < T4, T3 >.
Conflict Serializability (Cont.)
 Schedule 3 below can be transformed into Schedule 1, a serial
schedule where T2 follows T1, by series of swaps of non-conflicting
instructions. Therefore Schedule 3 is conflict serializable.
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:
1. For each data item Q, if transaction Ti reads the initial value of Q in
schedule S, then transaction Ti must, in schedule S´, also read the initial
value of Q.
2. For each data item Q if transaction Ti executes read(Q) in schedule S,
and that value was produced by transaction Tj (if any), then transaction
Ti must in schedule S´ also read the value of Q that was produced by
transaction Tj .
3. For each data item Q, the transaction (if any) that performs the final
write(Q) operation in schedule S must perform the final write(Q)
operation in schedule S´.
As can be seen, view equivalence is also based purely on reads
and writes alone.
View Serializability (Cont.)
 A schedule S is view serializable it is view equivalent to a serial
schedule.
 Every conflict serializable schedule is also view serializable.
 Schedule 9 (from text) — a schedule which is view-serializable but
not conflict serializable.
Every view serializable schedule that is not conflict
serializable has blind writes.

 s
Recoverable Schedules
Need to address the effect of transaction failures on concurrently
running transactions.
 Recoverable schedule — if a transaction Tj reads a data items
previously written by a transaction Ti , the commit operation of Ti
appears 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 Schedule
 Every cascadeless schedule is also recoverable
 It is desirable to restrict the schedules to those that are
cascadeless
 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.
Cascadeless Schedules (Cont.)
 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
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.
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.

 Rollback work causes current transaction to abort.

 Levels of consistency specified by SQL-92:

 Serializable — default

 Repeatable read

 Read committed

 Read uncommitted
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