UNIT VI Transactions (PART I)

Transaction Concept Transaction State Implementation of Atomicity and Durability Concurrent Executions

Serializability
Recoverability Implementation of Isolation Transaction Definition in SQL Testing for Serializability.

Database System Concepts

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Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan

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:
Failures of various kinds, such as hardware failures and system crashes Concurrent execution of multiple transactions

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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.
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.

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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.

Database System Concepts

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Example of Fund Transfer (Cont.d)

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.

Database System Concepts

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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.

Database System Concepts

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Transaction State (Cont.d)

Database System Concepts

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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.

Database System Concepts

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Implementation of Atomicity and Durability (Cont.d)

The shadow-database scheme:

Assumes disks to not fail

Useful for text editors, but extremely inefficient for large databases: executing a single transaction requires copying the entire database. Will see better schemes in Chapter 17.
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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
Disk-bound vs. CPU-bound systems

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
Will study in Chapter 14, after studying notion of correctness of concurrent executions.

Database System Concepts

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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.

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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.

Database System Concepts

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Example Schedule (Cont.d)

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.

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Example Schedules (Cont.d)

The following concurrent schedule (Schedule 4 in the text) does not preserve the value of the the sum A + B.

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Serializability
Basic Assumption Each transaction must preserve 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.

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Conflict Serializability
Instructions li and lj of transactions Ti and Tj respectively, conflict if there exists some item Q accessed by both li and lj, and at least one of these instructions writes Q. 1. li = read(Q), lj = read(Q). li and lj do not 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 if they are interchanged in the schedule.

Database System Concepts

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Conflict Serializability (Cont.d)

If a schedule S can be transformed into an equivalent 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 read(Q) T4 write(Q)

write(Q)
We are unable to swap instructions in the above schedule to obtain either an equivalent serial schedule < T3, T4 >, or an equivalent serial schedule < T4, T3 >.

Database System Concepts

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Conflict Serializability (Cont.d)

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.

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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 performs read(Q) in schedule S, where Q was written by some transaction Tj , then transaction Ti must in schedule S also perform read(Q) on the result of same write(Q) in 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.

Database System Concepts

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View Serializability (Cont.d)

A schedule S is view serializable it is view equivalent to a serial schedule.

Theorem: every conflict serializable schedule is also view serializable.

Example: a schedule which is view-serializable but not conflict serializable:

Every view serializable schedule that is not conflict serializable has so-called blind writes.

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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.
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Recoverability
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 , 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 or rollback, T9 would have read (and possibly shown/committed to the user) an incorrect database state. Hence database must ensure that schedules are recoverable.
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Recoverability (Cont.d)
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

Database System Concepts

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Recoverability (Cont.d)
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 (why?) It is desirable to restrict schedules to those that are cascadeless

Database System Concepts

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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.

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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

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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

y
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Example Schedule (Schedule A)

T1 read(Y) read(Z) T2 read(X) T3 T4 T5

read(V) read(W) read(W)

read(Y) write(Y)

write(Z)
read(U) read(Y) write(Y) read(Z) write(Z) read(U) write(U)

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