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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Transaction

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/trænˈzækʃən/nounCore term

In software engineering, transaction means: A group of database operations that are treated as one unit: either all of them succeed together or none of them is applied.

In Turkish: işlem, 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
  • commitA saved snapshot of changes in a repository, with a short message that explains what was changed and why. Also used as a verb: to commit your changes.
  • roll backTo return a system to an earlier working version after a release or change causes problems.
  • 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:

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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