ACID Transactions
ACID is a set of four properties that guarantee database transactions are processed reliably: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability. Together they ensure that transactions either fully succeed or fully fail, and that committed data survives.
The four guarantees
Atomicity means a transaction is all-or-nothing: either every part succeeds or none does. Consistency means a transaction moves the database from one valid state to another. Isolation means concurrent transactions do not interfere with each other. Durability means once committed, the change survives crashes.
These guarantees matter most in transactional, OLTP systems, where you are updating individual records and correctness is critical, like moving money between accounts. They are the bedrock of relational databases.
Analytical systems often relax some of these guarantees in exchange for the throughput needed to ingest and query enormous volumes, since the workload is append-and-analyze rather than update-in-place.
Related terms
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