Transaction

How it is used

The classic example is a money transfer: the debit and the credit must both happen or neither. You begin or open a transaction, then commit or roll it back. Long-running or open transactions hold locks and cause trouble, so DBAs watch for them.

Example sentences

1. Wrap the stock update and the order insert in a single transaction.

2. A transaction has been open for two hours and is blocking the nightly job.

Common collocations

• begin a transaction
• commit a transaction
• roll back a transaction
• open transaction
• transaction log

Related terms

• commitTo end a transaction and make all of its changes permanent, so that other sessions can see them and they survive a crash.
• rollbackThe 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.
• ACIDAtomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability: the four guarantees that make database transactions reliable even with errors, crashes and many users at once.
• isolation levelA setting that controls how much one transaction can see of other transactions' changes, trading data safety against speed and concurrency.
• lockA mark the database places on a row, page or table so that other transactions cannot change it, or sometimes read it, until the current transaction ends.

This word in other fields

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

• transaction · Software Engineering
• transaction · Blockchain & Crypto
• transaction · Finance & Banking

More terms: Transactions and Concurrency

• deadlock