Isolation (database systems)

In database systems, isolation determines how transaction integrity is visible to other users and systems. For example, when a user is creating a Purchase Order and has created the header, but not the Purchase Order lines, is the header available for other systems/users, carrying out concurrent operations (such as a report on Purchase Orders), to see?

A lower isolation level increases the ability of many users to access data at the same time, but increases the number of concurrency effects (such as dirty reads or lost updates) users might encounter. Conversely, a higher isolation level reduces the types of concurrency effects that users may encounter, but requires more system resources and increases the chances that one transaction will block another.

Isolation is typically defined at database level as a property that defines how/when the changes made by one operation become visible to other. On older systems, it may be implemented systemically, for example through the use of temporary tables. In two-tier systems, a Transaction Processing (TP) manager is required to maintain isolation. In n-tier systems (such as multiple websites attempting to book the last seat on a flight), a combination of stored procedures and transaction management is required to commit the booking and send confirmation to the customer.

Isolation is one of the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties.

Concurrency control comprises the underlying mechanisms in a DBMS which handle isolation and guarantee related correctness. It is heavily used by the database and storage engines (see above) both to guarantee the correct execution of concurrent transactions, and (different mechanisms) the correctness of other DBMS processes. The transaction-related mechanisms typically constrain the database data access operations' timing (transaction schedules) to certain orders characterized as the serializability and recoverability schedule properties. Constraining database access operation execution typically means reduced performance (rates of execution), and thus concurrency control mechanisms are typically designed to provide the best performance possible under the constraints. Often, when possible without harming correctness, the serializability property is compromised for better performance. However, recoverability cannot be compromised, since such typically results in a quick database integrity violation.

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