Decoding Isolation - The I in ACID

Source: https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs/isolation Date: 2021-07-07

Dive into database isolation! Understand its importance in maintaining data integrity during concurrent transactions with real-world examples.

After talking about the “A” and the “C” in ACID, let’s talk about the “I” in ACID - Isolation. In this one, we do a micro-dive into Isolation in the context of database. We will take a detailed look into Isolation, understand its importance, functioning, and how the database implements it.

What is Isolation?

Isolation is the ability of the database to concurrently process multiple transactions in a way that changes made in one does not affect the other. A simple analogy is how we have to make our data structures and variables thread-safe in a multi-threaded (concurrent) environment.

And similar to how we use Mutex and Semaphores to protect variables, the database uses locks (shared and exclusive) to protect transactions from one another.