Transactions - What's it all about?
Far more than just locking
The A.C.I.D. test
- Atomicity - Consistency - Isolation - Durability
True transactions give true safety
- even from power failures and system crashes!
- Incomplete transactions are automatically rolled-back by the database server when it's restarted.
Also removes burden of undoing incomplete changes
Hard to implement (for the vendor)
- and can have significant performance cost
A very large topic worthy of an entire tutorial