1. Introduction to Transaction Processing

In order to change a database in some way, there needs to be a specific chunk of work (operations) carried successfully.

This set of operations in called a database transaction.

A database transaction is a set of operations that update one or more databases in some way.

A transaction can only have two outcomes:

1. The transaction succeeds
2. The transaction fails

A partially-successful transaction that fails to complete properly should be detected by the system and effectively cancelled so that the database is in exactly the same state as it was as if the transaction never happened.

This section describes some important features of transaction processing.