This chapter presents a broad coverage of transaction management. Before you can understand DBMS support for transaction processing, you need a more detailed understanding of transaction concepts. This chapter describes properties of transactions, SQL statements to define transactions, and properties of transaction processing. After learning about transaction concepts, you are ready to study concurrency control and recovery management, two major services to support transaction processing. For concurrency control, this chapter describes the objective, interference problems, and tools of concurrency control. For recovery management, this chapter describes failure types, recovery tools, and recovery processes.
Besides knowing the transaction management services provided by a DBMS, you should understand the issues of transaction design. This chapter describes important issues of transaction design including hot spots, transaction boundaries, isolation levels, and integrity constraint enforcement. To broaden your background, you should understand how database transactions fit into the larger context of collaborative work. The final section describes workflow management and contrasts it with transaction management in DBMSs.