Unveiling the Truths of Database Transactions: Myths, Surprises, and Opportunities

Timestamped Summary

• 🤔
  00:00

  Database transactions can be tricky, but understanding the principles of ACID and durability can help guarantee consistency.
• 🤔
  04:26

  ACID's C doesn't have the same structure or properties as the other letters, Atomicity refers to how faults are handled, and Transactions allow multiple mutations to be wrapped in one logical unit.
• 🤔
  09:33

  Read Committed prevents dirty reads and writes, but race conditions like read skewed can still occur, so it's important to consider them when writing an application.
• 🤕
  15:37

  Read skew can be prevented with locks (repeatable read) or multi-version concurrency control (snapshot isolation) to ensure a transaction only sees the database as it was at one point in time.
• 🔒
  21:07

  H Store and Postgres developed techniques to implement serializability without two-phase locking, executing transactions within 100 microseconds and using a similar transaction commit principle as Multi B John hug.
• 🤔
  25:35

  For distributed services, people use compensating transactions to avoid the brittleness of two-phase commit.
• 🤔
  32:51

  Compensating transactions and eventual consistency can help us reason logically about data in a microservices world, while still obeying causality and read committed.
• 📚
  40:03

  Giving away 25 free copies of my book + e-book discount code during lunch!