J2EE™ Tutorial, The

What Is a Transaction?

To emulate a business transaction, a program may need to perform several steps. A financial program, for example, might transfer funds from a checking account to a savings account with the steps listed in the following pseudocode:

begin transaction 
   debit checking account 
   credit savings account 
   update history log 
commit transaction 

Either all three of these steps must complete, or none of them at all. Otherwise, data integrity is lost. Because the steps within a transaction are a unified whole, a transaction is often defined as an indivisible unit of work.

A transaction can end in two ways: with a commit or a rollback. When a transaction commits, the data modifications made by its statements are saved. If a statement ...