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Databases & SQL vocabulary · Transactions and Concurrency

Rollback

Meaning in databases & SQL, with examples

/ˈroʊlbæk/nounCore term

In databases & SQL, rollback means: The act of cancelling a transaction so that all of its changes are undone and the data returns to how it was before the transaction began.

In Turkish: geri alma, rollback

How it is used

Triggered by a ROLLBACK statement, by an error, or by the database itself, for example to break a deadlock. Savepoints allow a partial rollback inside a transaction. Outside databases, 'rollback' also means returning to an earlier software release.

Example sentences

  1. The payment insert failed, so the whole transaction ended in a rollback.

  2. A rollback of a long transaction can take almost as long as the transaction itself.

Common collocations

  • roll back a transaction
  • automatic rollback
  • rollback segment
  • partial rollback
  • transactionA group of database operations that are treated as one unit: either all of them succeed together or none of them is applied.
  • commitTo end a transaction and make all of its changes permanent, so that other sessions can see them and they survive a crash.
  • ACIDAtomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability: the four guarantees that make database transactions reliable even with errors, crashes and many users at once.
  • deadlockA situation where two or more transactions each wait for a lock the other holds, so none of them can continue until the database cancels one.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Transactions and Concurrency

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