3.2.9

Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation & Durability

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Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability (ACID)

ACID ensures all transactions complete successfully, or if they fail, the data is left as it was before.

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Atomicity

  • Atomicity is the classification of transactions as a single task that either passes or fails.
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Consistency

  • Consistency ensures that the data being committed as part of the transaction complies both with validation rules and referential integrity.
  • This means a record cannot be added or updated if it uses a value in a foreign key field that doesn’t exist in the linked table.
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Isolation

  • The isolation part of the principals ensures that the data is locked whilst a transaction is processing.
  • The data in the database should look the same as if all transactions happened sequentially instead of concurrently.
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Durability

  • Durability ensures that once a transaction is completed, it is committed to the database and will stay in the database for good.
  • When booking your cinema tickets, the DBMS will make use of a buffer and record locks to store the individual parts of a transaction until it is all completed.
  • At this point, the transaction is committed to the database permanently.

Jump to other topics

1Components of a Computer

2Software & Software Development

3Exchanging Data

4Data Types, Data Structures & Algorithms

5Legal, Moral, Cultural & Ethical Issues

6Elements of Computational Thinking

6.1Thinking Abstractly

6.2Thinking Ahead

6.3Thinking Procedurally

6.4Thinking Logically

6.5Thinking Concurrently

7Problem Solving & Programming

8Algorithms

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