UNIT-4:

TRANSAC
TIONS
 Transaction Concept

Transaction State

Concurrent Executions
OUTLIN Serializability
E
Recoverability

Implementation of Isolation

Testing for Serializability.

 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:
TRANSA
CTION 1. read(A)
•
• 2. A := A – 50

CONCEP •
•
3.
4.
write(A)
read(B)
T •
•
5.
6.
B := B + 50
write(B)

Two main issues to deal with:

• Failures of various kinds, such as hardware

failures and system crashes
• Concurrent execution of multiple transactions
  Consider a transaction to transfer $50 from account A to
account B:
1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50

REQUIRE 3.
4.
write(A)
read(B)

D 5.
6.
B := B + 50
write(B)

PROPERT  Atomicity requirement

 If the transaction fails after step 3 and before step 6,

IES OF A money will be “lost” leading to an inconsistent database

state

TRANSA
 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
CTION  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.
 REQUIRED PROPERTIES
OF A TRANSACTION
(CONT.)
 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, when starting to execute, 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
  Isolation requirement — if between steps 3
and 6 (of the fund transfer transaction) , 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
REQUIRE should be).

D                T1                                        T2
1. read(A)
PROPERT 2.
3.
A := A – 50
write(A)

IES OF A 4.
                                   read(A), read(B), print(A+B)
read(B)

TRANSA 5.
6.
B := B + 50
write(B

CTION  Isolation can be ensured trivially by running

(CONT.) transactions serially That is, one after the
other.   
 However, executing multiple transactions
concurrently has significant benefits, as we will
see later.
 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. 
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.)
 Multiple transactions are allowed to
run concurrently in the system.
Advantages are:
• Increased processor and disk utilization,
leading to better transaction throughput

CONCU • E.g. one transaction can be using the CPU

while another is reading from or writing to the

RRENT disk
• Reduced average response time for

EXECUT transactions: short transactions need not wait

behind long ones.
Concurrency control schemes –
IONS 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
• Will study in Chapter 15, after studying notion
of correctness of concurrent executions.
 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.
SCHEDU A transaction that successfully
LES 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
SCHEDU
LE 1
Let T1 transfer $50 from
A to B, and T2 transfer
10% of the balance from
A to B.
An example of a serial
schedule in which T1 is
followed by T2 :
SCHEDU
LE 2
A serial schedule in
which T2 is followed by
T1 :
SCHEDU
LE 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.

Note -- In schedules 1, 2 and 3, the sum “A + B” is

preserved.
 SCHEDU
LE 4
The following concurrent
schedule does not preserve the
sum  of  “A + B ”
 Basic Assumption – Each transaction
preserves database consistency.

Thus, serial execution of a set of

SERIALIZA transactions preserves database
consistency.
BILITY
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

SIMPLIFIE We assume that transactions

D VIEW may perform arbitrary
computations on data in local
OF buffers in between reads and
TRANSAC writes.
TIONS
Our simplified schedules
consist of only read and write
instructions.
 Let li and lj  be two Instructions of
transactions Ti and Tj respectively. 
Instructions li and lj conflict if and only if
there exists some item Q accessed by both li
and lj, and at least one of these instructions
wrote
1. Q.
li = read(Q), lj = read(Q).   li and lj don’t
conflict.
   2. li = read(Q),  lj = write(Q).  They
CONFLIC conflict.
   3. li = write(Q), lj = read(Q).   They conflict
TING    4. li = write(Q), lj = write(Q).  They
conflict
INSTRUC
TIONS 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.
 If a schedule S can be
transformed into a schedule
S´ by a series of swaps of
non-conflicting
instructions, we say that S
CONFLICT and S´ are conflict
equivalent.
SERIALIZA
BILITY
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 a series of swaps of non-conflicting instructions. 
Therefore, Schedule 3 is conflict serializable.

Schedule 3 Schedule 6
 Example of a schedule that is not conflict
serializable:

CONFLICT
SERIALIZA
BILITY
(CONT.)
We are unable to swap instructions in the above
schedule to obtain either the serial schedule
< T3, T4 >, or the serial schedule < T4, T3 >.
 PRECEDEN
CE GRAPH
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
TESTING FOR
CONFLICT
SERIALIZABIL
ITY
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.
 That is, a linear order consistent with
the partial order of the graph.
 For example, a serializability order
for the schedule (a) would be one of
either (b) or (c)
 RECOVERA
BLE
SCHEDULES
Recoverable schedule —

if a transaction Tj reads a data item

previously written by a transaction Ti ,
then the commit operation of Ti  must
appear before the commit operation of
Tj.

The following schedule is not

recoverable if T9 commits immediately
after the read(A) operation.

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 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)

CASCAD
ING
ROLLBA
CKS
If T10 fails, T11 and T12 must also be rolled back.
Can lead to the undoing of a significant amount of work
 Cascadeless schedules — 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
CASCAD It is desirable to restrict the schedules to those that
ELESS are cascadeless

SCHEDU Example of  a schedule that is NOT cascadeless

LES
 A database must provide a mechanism that will
ensure that all possible schedules are both:
• Conflict serializable.
• Recoverable and preferably cascadeless
A policy in which only one transaction can
execute at a time generates serial schedules, but
CONCUR provides a poor degree of concurrency

RENCY Concurrency-control schemes tradeoff between

the amount of concurrency they allow and the
CONTRO amount of overhead that they incur

L Testing a schedule for serializability after it has

executed is a little too late!
• Tests for serializability help us understand why a
concurrency control protocol is correct

Goal – to develop concurrency control

protocols that will assure serializability.
 Data manipulation language must include a
construct for specifying the set of actions
that comprise a transaction.
TRANSA In SQL, a transaction begins implicitly.
CTION A transaction in SQL ends by:

DEFINITI
 Commit work commits current transaction and
begins a new one.
 Rollback work causes current transaction to abort.
ON IN In almost all database systems, by default,
SQL every SQL statement also commits
implicitly if it executes successfully
 Implicit commit can be turned off by a database
directive
 E.g. in JDBC, connection.setAutoCommit(false);
OTHER
NOTIONS OF
SERIALIZABILIT
Y
 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.
VIEW 2. If in schedule S transaction Ti executes
read(Q), and that value was produced
SERIALIZA by transaction Tj  (if any), then in
schedule S’ also transaction Ti must
BILITY 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.
  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.

VIEW
SERIALIZA
BILITY
(CONT.)

 What serial schedule is above equivalent to?

 Every view serializable schedule that is not conflict
serializable has blind writes.
 The precedence graph test for conflict
serializability cannot be used directly
to test for view serializability.

 Extension to test for view serializability has cost

exponential in the size of the precedence graph.
TEST FOR The problem of checking if a schedule
VIEW is view serializable falls in the class of
NP-complete problems. 
SERIALIZA
BILITY   Thus, existence of an efficient algorithm is
extremely unlikely.

However ,practical algorithms that just

check some sufficient conditions for
view serializability can still be used.
  The schedule below produces the same
outcome as the serial schedule < T1, T5 >,
MORE COMPLEX yet is not conflict equivalent or view
NOTIONS OF equivalent to it.  
SERIALIZABILIT
Y

 If we start with A = 1000 and B = 2000,

the final result is 960 and 2040
 Determining such equivalence requires
analysis of operations other than read and
write.