Transaction Processing and ACID

What is ACID?

In computer science, ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps.

What's the Context?

In the context of databases, a sequence of database operations that satisfies the ACID properties (which can be perceived as a single logical operation on the data) is called a transaction.

Example

For example, a transfer of funds from one bank account to another, even involving multiple changes such as debiting one account and crediting another, is a single transaction.

Additional Reading - explanations of each of the terms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID

Atomicity

Transactions are often composed of multiple statements. Atomicity guarantees that each transaction is treated as a single "unit", which either succeeds completely, or fails completely: if any of the statements constituting a transaction fails to complete, the entire transaction fails and the database is left unchanged. 

An example of an atomic transaction is a monetary transfer from bank account A to account B. It consists of two operations, withdrawing the money from account A and saving it to account B. Performing these operations in an atomic transaction ensures that the database remains in a consistent state, that is, money is neither debited nor credited if either of those two operations fail.

Consistency

Consistency ensures that a transaction can only bring the database from one valid state to another, maintaining database invariants: any data written to the database must be valid according to all defined rules, including constraints, cascades, triggers, and any combination thereof. This prevents database corruption by an illegal transaction, but does not guarantee that a transaction is correct. Referential integrity guarantees the primary key – foreign key relationship. 

Isolation

Transactions are often executed concurrently (e.g., multiple transactions reading and writing to a table at the same time). Isolation ensures that concurrent execution of transactions leaves the database in the same state that would have been obtained if the transactions were executed sequentially. Isolation is the main goal of concurrency control; depending on the method used, the effects of an incomplete transaction might not even be visible to other transactions. 

Durability

Durability guarantees that once a transaction has been committed, it will remain committed even in the case of a system failure (e.g., power outage or crash). This usually means that completed transactions (or their effects) are recorded in non-volatile memory.[citation needed]