1: Transaction Processing

Question 1

What is a transaction ?

Answer 1

An action, or series of actions, carried out by a single user or application program, which reads or updates the contents of the database.

Question 2

What is a logical unit of work ?

Answer 2

It’s a transaction. That transforms the database from one consistent state to another.

Question 3

What other units are transactions?

Answer 3

Unit of :

- Concurrency
- Recovery
- Work

Question 4

What are the 4 ACID properties?

Answer 4

• Atomicity
• Consistency
• Isolation
• Durability

Question 5

How are transactions reliable and consistent, and to what mechanisms do they relate to ?

Answer 5

The are due to the “ACIDity” properties of transactions.

They relate to the concurrency control and recovery mechanisms:

Question 6

What are the 3 types of schedules ?

Answer 6

• Schedule: preserves the order of the operations
• Serial schedule: executed consecutively without interleaved operations from other transactions
• Nonserial schedule: concurrent transactions are interleaved

Question 7

When/how is a schedule conflict serialisable ?

Answer 7

If it is (conflict) equivalent to some serial schedule.

Any conflicting operations are ordered in the same way as some serial schedule.

Question 8

Give the type of schedule:

Sa: read(T1, X); read(T2, X); write(T1, X); write(T2, X); commit(T1); commit(T2);

Answer 8

• Not conflict serializable – there is a cycle in the precedence graph because read(T2,X) conflicts with write(T1, X) and Write(T1, X) conflicts with write(T2, X)

T1 T2

• Recoverable – because T1 is the first to write item X and it commits before T2 commits
• Avoids cascading abort (cascadeless) – because T1, having written item X before T2 writes item X, commits first

Question 9

Give the type of schedule:

Sb: read(T1, X); read(T2, Y); read(T3, X); write(T3, X); read(T2, X); read(T1, Y); abort(T3); commit(T1); commit(T2);

Answer 9

• Conflict serializable – no cycle (gives T1 >T3 >T2)
• Recoverable - T3 is the first to write X and then T2 reads X, so T3 should commit first. However, T3 aborts so there is no effect on the item
• Cascading abort - T3 abort means T2 would also have to abort as it has read the value of an aborted transaction

Question 10

Give the type of schedule:

Sc: read(T1, X); read(T2, X); write(T1, X); read(T1, Y); write(T2, X); commit(T2); write(T1, X); commit(T1);

Answer 10

• Not Conflict serializable
• Recoverable – T1 is the first to write X so it should commit first. However, T2 does not read X after the T1 write
• Avoids cascading abort (cascadeless) – no aborted transactions