Skip to Content
SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide
book

SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide

by Chris Fehily
July 2002
Beginner
424 pages
9h 30m
English
Peachpit Press
Content preview from SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide

Chapter 13. Transactions

A transaction is a sequence of one or more SQL statements executed as a single logical unit of work. The DBMS considers a transaction to be an indivisible, all-or-nothing proposition: It executes all the transaction’s statements as a group, or it executes none of them.

Canonical law requires me to illustrate the importance of transactions with a banking example. Suppose that a customer transfers $500 from her savings account to her checking account. This operation consists of two separate actions, executed sequentially:

1.
Decrement savings account by $500.
2.
Increment checking account by $500.

Figure 13.1 shows the two SQL statements for this transaction. Now imagine that the DBMS fails—power outage, system crash, ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

SQL: Visual Quickstart Guide, Second Edition

SQL: Visual Quickstart Guide, Second Edition

Chris Fehily
SQL Hacks

SQL Hacks

Andrew Cumming, Gordon Russell
MySQL Stored Procedure Programming

MySQL Stored Procedure Programming

Guy Harrison, Steven Feuerstein

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0321118030Purchase book