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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 186–189Cite as

Atomicity

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Definition

The atomicity of actions on a database is a fundamental guarantee that database systems provide to application programs. Whatever state modifications an atomic action may perform are guaranteed to be executed in an all-or-nothing manner: either all state changes caused by the action will be installed in the database or none. This property is important in the potential presence of failures that could interrupt the atomic action. The database system prepares itself for this case by logging state modifications and providing automated recovery as part of the failure handling or system restart. These implementation aspects are transparent to the application program and are thus a major relief for the programs’ failure handling and boost the application development productivity.

Historical Background

Since the early 1970s (or even earlier), transaction processing systems for airline reservations and debit/credit banking had means for recovery and concurrency control that were...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department 5: Databases and Information Systems, Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Gerhard Weikum

Authors
  1. Gerhard Weikum
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gerhard Weikum .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dep. of Inf. Systems, Westf. Wilhelms-Univeristät, Münster, Germany

    Gottfried Vossen

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Weikum, G. (2018). Atomicity. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_28

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