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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Dirty read

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, dirty read means: Reading a change made by another transaction before that transaction commits it.

In Turkish: kirli okuma

How it is used

Used when discussing transaction isolation. The read value may later disappear if the other transaction rolls back.

Example sentences

  1. A dirty read made the report include an order that was later rolled back.

    The report consumed data that never became a committed order.

  2. The isolation setting prevented a dirty read while another transaction updated the balance.

    The reader could not observe the other transaction's uncommitted balance change.

Common collocations

  • allow a dirty read
  • prevent a dirty read
  • isolation levelA setting that controls how much one transaction can see of other transactions' changes, trading data safety against speed and concurrency.
  • transactionA group of database operations that are treated as one unit: either all of them succeed together or none of them is applied.

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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