Isolation
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## Isolation

Isolation guarantees are an important aspect of transactional protection. Transactions ensure the data your transaction is working with will not be changed by some other transaction. Moreover, the modifications made by a transaction will never be viewable outside of that transaction until the changes have been committed.

That said, there are different degrees of isolation, and you can choose to relax your isolation guarantees to one degree or another depending on your application's requirements. The primary reason why you might want to do this is because of performance; the more isolation you ask your transactions to provide, the more locking that your application must do. With more locking comes a greater chance of blocking, which in turn causes your threads to pause while waiting for a lock. Therefore, by relaxing your isolation guarantees, you can potentially improve your application's throughput. Whether you actually see any improvement depends, of course, on the nature of your application's data and transactions.

### Supported Degrees of Isolation

Sleepycat supports the following levels of isolation:

Degree | ANSI Term | Definition
--- | --- | ---

1

READ UNCOMMITTED

Uncommitted reads means that one transaction will never overwrite another transaction's dirty data. Dirty data is data that a transaction has modified but not yet committed to the underlying data store. However, uncommitted reads allows a transaction to see data dirtied by another transaction. In addition, a transaction may read data dirtied by another transaction, but which subsequently is aborted by that other transaction. In this latter case, the reading transaction may be reading data that never really existed in the database.

2

READ COMMITTED

Committed read isolation means that degree 1 is observed, plus data will never change so long as it is addressed by the cursor, but the data may change before the reading cursor is closed. In the case of a transaction, data at the current cursor position will not change, but once the cursor moves, the previous referenced data can change. This means that readers release read locks before the cursor is closed, and therefore, before the transaction completes. Note that this level of isolation causes the cursor to operate in exactly the same way as it does in the absence of a transaction.

3

SERIALIZABLE

Committed read is observed, plus the data read by a transaction, T, will never be dirtied by another transaction before T completes. This means that both read and write locks are not released until the transaction completes.

In addition, no transactions will see phantoms. Phantoms are records returned as a result of a search, but which were not seen by the same transaction when the identical search criteria was previously used.

This is JE's default isolation guarantee.

By default, JE transactions and transactional cursors offer serializable isolation. You can optionally reduce your isolation level by configuring JE to use uncommitted read isolation. See Reading Uncommitted Data for more information. You can also configure JE to use committed read isolation. See Committed Reads for more information.

### Reading Uncommitted Data

You can configure your application to read data that has been modified but not yet committed by another transaction; that is, dirty data. When you do this, you may see a performance benefit by allowing your application to not have to block waiting for write locks. On the other hand, the data that your application is reading may change before the transaction has completed.

When used with transactions, uncommitted reads means that one transaction can see data modified but not yet committed by another transaction. When used with transactional cursors, uncommitted reads means that any database reader can see data modified by the cursor before the cursor's transaction has committed.

Because of this, uncommitted reads allow a transaction to read data that may subsequently be aborted by another transaction. In this case, the reading transaction will have read data that never really existed in the database.

To configure your application to read uncommitted data:

1. Open your database such that it will allow uncommitted reads. You do this by specifying `DB_READ_UNCOMMITTED` when you open your database.

2. Specify `DB_READ_UNCOMMITTED` when you create the transaction, open the cursor, or read a record from the database.

For example, the following opens the database such that it supports uncommitted reads, and then creates a transaction that causes all reads performed within it to use uncommitted reads. Remember that simply opening the database to support uncommitted reads is not enough; you must also declare your read operations to be performed using uncommitted reads.

    #include "db_cxx.h"

    ...

    int main(void)
    {
        u_int32_t env_flags = DB_CREATE     |  // If the environment does not
                                               // exist, create it.
                              DB_INIT_LOCK  |  // Initialize locking
                              DB_INIT_LOG   |  // Initialize logging
                              DB_INIT_MPOOL |  // Initialize the cache
                              DB_THREAD     |  // Free-thread the env handle
                              DB_INIT_TXN;     // Initialize transactions

        u_int32_t db_flags = DB_CREATE |           // Create the db if it does
                                                   // not exist
                             DB_AUTO_COMMIT |      // Enable auto commit
                             DB_READ_UNCOMMITTED;  // Enable uncommitted reads

        Db *dbp = NULL;
        const char *file_name = "mydb.db";
        const char *keystr ="thekey";
        const char *datastr = "thedata";

        std::string envHome("/export1/testEnv");
        DbEnv myEnv(0);

        try {

            myEnv.open(envHome.c_str(), env_flags, 0);
            dbp = new Db(&myEnv, 0);
            dbp->open(NULL,       // Txn pointer
                      file_name,  // File name
                      NULL,       // Logical db name
                      DB_BTREE,   // Database type (using btree)
                      db_flags,   // Open flags
                      0);         // File mode. Using defaults

            DbTxn *txn = NULL;
            myEnv.txn_begin(NULL, &txn, DB_READ_UNCOMMITTED);

            // From here, you perform your database reads and writes as normal,
            // committing and aborting the transactions as is necessary, and
            // testing for deadlock exceptions as normal (omitted for brevity).

            ...

### Committed Reads

You can configure your transaction so that the data being read by a transactional cursor is consistent so long as it is being addressed by the cursor. However, once the cursor is done reading the record (that is, reading records from the page that it currently has locked), the cursor releases its lock on that record or page. This means that the data the cursor has read and released may change before the cursor's transaction has completed.

For example, suppose you have two transactions, `Ta` and `Tb`. Suppose further that `Ta` has a cursor that reads `record R`, but does not modify it. Normally, `Tb` would then be unable to write `record R` because `Ta` would be holding a read lock on it. But when you configure your transaction for committed reads, `Tb` can modify `record R` before `Ta` completes, so long as the reading cursor is no longer addressing the record or page.

When you configure your application for this level of isolation, you may see better performance throughput because there are fewer read locks being held by your transactions. Read committed isolation is most useful when you have a cursor that is reading and/or writing records in a single direction, and that does not ever have to go back to re-read those same records. In this case, you can allow JE to release read locks as it goes, rather than hold them for the life of the transaction.

To configure your application to use committed reads, do one of the following:

- Create your transaction such that it allows committed reads. You do this by specifying `DB_READ_COMMITTED` when you open the transaction.

- Specify `DB_READ_COMMITTED` when you open the cursor.

For example, the following creates a transaction that allows committed reads:

    #include "db_cxx.h"

    ...

    int main(void)
    {
        u_int32_t env_flags = DB_CREATE     |  // If the environment does not
                                               // exist, create it.
                              DB_INIT_LOCK  |  // Initialize locking
                              DB_INIT_LOG   |  // Initialize logging
                              DB_INIT_MPOOL |  // Initialize the cache
                              DB_THREAD     |  // Free-thread the env handle
                              DB_INIT_TXN;     // Initialize transactions

        // Notice that we do not have to specify any flags to the database to
        // allow committed reads (this is as opposed to uncommitted reads
        // where we DO have to specify a flag on the database open.
        u_int32_t db_flags = DB_CREATE | DB_AUTO_COMMIT;
        Db *dbp = NULL;
        const char *file_name = "mydb.db";

        std::string envHome("/export1/testEnv");
        DbEnv myEnv(0);

        try {

            myEnv.open(envHome.c_str(), env_flags, 0);
            dbp = new Db(&myEnv, 0);
            dbp->open(NULL,       // Txn pointer
                      file_name,  // File name
                      NULL,       // Logical db name
                      DB_BTREE,   // Database type (using btree)
                      db_flags,   // Open flags
                      0);         // File mode. Using defaults

            DbTxn *txn = NULL;

            // Open the transaction and enable committed reads. All cursors
            // open with this transaction handle will use read committed
            // isolation.
            myEnv.txn_begin(NULL, &txn, DB_READ_COMMITTED);

            // From here, you perform your database reads and writes as normal,
            // committing and aborting the transactions as is necessary,
            // testing for deadlock exceptions as normal (omitted for brevity).

            // Using transactional cursors with concurrent applications is
            // described in more detail in the following section.

            ...

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