Transactions

Dr. M. Brindha
Assistant Professor
Department of CSE
NIT, Trichy-15
 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 inconsistent.
• When the transaction is committed, the
database must be consistent.
• Two main issues to deal with:
• Failuresof various kinds, such as hardware failures and
system crashes
• Concurrent execution of multiple transactions
 ACID Properties
To preserve 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.
• Thatis, 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)
• Consistency requirement – the sum of A and B is
unchanged by the execution of the transaction.
• 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.
Example of Fund Transfer (Cont.)
• 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.
• 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).
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.
 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 – only if no internal logical error
• kill the transaction

• Committed, after successful completion.

Transaction State (Cont.)
Implementation of Atomicity and Durability
• Therecovery-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 to not fail

• Usefulfor text editors, but extremely inefficient for large
databases: executing a single transaction requires copying
the entire database.
 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, i.e., to control the interaction
among the concurrent transactions in order to
prevent them from destroying the consistency of the
database
 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.
Schedule 2 -- A Serial Schedule in Which
T2 is Followed by T1
 Example Schedule (Cont.)
• Let T1 and T2 be the transactions defined previously. The
following schedule (Schedule 3 in the text) is not a serial
schedule, but it is equivalent to Schedule 1.

In both Schedule 1 and 3, the sum A + B is preserved.

 Example Schedules (Cont.)
• Thefollowing concurrent schedule (Schedule 4 in
the text) does not preserve the value of the sum 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 give rise to the notions of:
1. conflict serializability
2. view serializability
• 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.
 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
• 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.
 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.
Schedule 5 -- Schedule 3 After Swapping A Pair of
Instructions
Schedule 6 -- A Serial Schedule That is Equivalent to
Schedule 3
 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.
 Other Notions of Serializability
• Schedule 8 (from text) given below produces same
outcome as the serial schedule < T1, T5 >, yet is not conflict
equivalent or view equivalent to it.

• Determining such equivalence requires analysis of

operations other than read and write.
 Recoverability
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 (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.
 Recoverability (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
Recoverability (Cont.)
• 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
• It
is desirable to restrict the schedules to those that
are cascadeless
 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.
x
• Example 1

y
 Test for Conflict Serializability
•A schedule is conflict serializable if and only if its
precedence graph is acyclic.
• 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.
Example Schedule
 Example Schedule

List all the conflicting operations and determine

the dependency between the transactions-
•R2(X) , W3(X) (T2 → T3)
•R2(X) , W1(X) (T2 → T1)
•W3(X) , W1(X) (T3 → T1)
•W3(X) , R4(X) (T3 → T4)
•W1(X) , R4(X) (T1 → T4)
•W2(Y) , R4(Y) (T2 → T4)
Precedence Graph for Schedule A

T2->T3->T1->T4
Thank You!!!