Types of Failure And ACID Property

Q. What do you mean by transaction?

A transaction is a logical unit of work, which involves may

database operations.
A transaction is a collection of operations that forms a single
logical unit of work.
A transaction is a unit of program executions that accesses and
possibly updates various databases.
Example: Banking system, Student database performs
transactions.

Types of Failure

1. Transaction failures: It causes a transaction to fail. It is

again of 2 types.

•Logical error: When transaction can no longer continue with

its
normal execution because of some internal condition such as
bad i/p,
data not found, data overflow etc. it gives incorrect result. This
is
logical error.
Ex: any student data.

•System error: When system enters in some undesirable state,

then
also the transaction can’t continue it’s normal execution.
 Ex: deadlock state.
 2. System crash: In system crash there is a h/w malfunction or
a bug in the database s/w or the operating system, that causes
the loss of content of volatile storage and brings transaction
processing to a halt.

3.Disk failure: In this, a disk block loses its content as a result of

either head crash or failure during data transfer operation.
Copies of
data on other disk as tapes are used to recover them from failure.

Transaction States

DIAGRAM:

PARTIALLY COMMITTED
COMMITTED

ACTIVE

FAILED ABORTED

A transaction must be in one of the following states:

Active - It is initial state of transaction, transaction always

stays in this state while it is executing.
 Partially committed – Transaction stays in this state after the
final statement of the transaction has been executed. At this point,
the transaction has completed its execution, but it is still possible
that it may have to be aborted. Since the actual output may still be
there in main memory, and thus a h/w failure may preclude its
successful completion.

Failed – After the discovery that normal execution can no

longer proceed, transaction enters in final state.

Aborted - After the transaction has been rolled back and the
database has been restored to its state prior to the start of the
transaction, it enters in aborted state.

Committed – A transaction is in this state after it has

successfully completed it’s execution.

ACID Property

ACID properties are the properties of transaction.

A Atomicity
C Consistency
I Isolation
D Durability

Atomicity: Transactions are atomic, i.e., either all

operations of transactions are reflected in the database properly,
or none are.

Consistency: Transactions preserve database consistency,

i.e., a transaction transforms a consistent state of database into
 another consistent state, without preserving consistency at all
intermediate points.

Isolation: Even though, multiple transactions may

execute concurrently, the system guarantees that, for
every pair ti and tj, it appears to ti that either tj finished
execution before ti started or tj started execution after ti
finished. Thus each transaction is unaware of other
transactions executing concurrently in the system.

Durability: Once a transaction commits, it updates survive in

the database, even if there is a subsequent system crash.

Access to the Database

Access to the database is accomplished by following two

operations –
I) Read (X) – Which transfers the data item X from the
database to a local buffer belonging to the transaction that
executed the read operation.
II) Write (X) – Which transfers the data item X from the
database to a local buffer of the transaction and executed the
write operation back to the database.

Requirement of ACID Property For

Example:
Let, We Have a Transaction T
T: read (X);
X: = X-50;
Write (X);
Read (Y);
Y=Y+50;
Write (Y);
This transaction transfers $50 from acc. X to acc. Y

Consistency: Requirement here is that sum of the amounts of

both the account should be same before and after transaction. As money
cannot be destroyed or created.

Atomicity: Let the amount is $5000 in X and $2000 in Y prior to the

execution of the transaction T. While execution of T, a failure (say h/w or
s/w or power failure) has occurred that prevented T from completing it
successfully.
So atomicity says either complete execution of transaction T
should take place or there should be no transaction, that is handled by
Transaction-management component.
-
Isolation: This property ensures that the concurrent execution of
transaction results in a system state that is equivalent to a state that could
have been obtained had these transactions executed one at a time in some
order. It is the responsibility of system called concurrency-control
component.

Durability: This property guarantees that, once a transaction

completes successfully, all the updates that it carried out on the database
persist, even if there is a system failure after the transaction completes
execution. Ensuring durability is the responsibility of Recovery-
management component.