Atomicity ensures that a transaction is an all-or-nothing unit of work: either all operations are applied, or none are. This prevents partially applied changes and hazardous intermediate states.

In ACID terminology, atomicity works together with:

  • Consistency: transactions preserve integrity constraints.
  • Isolation: concurrent transactions do not interfere with each other.
  • Durability: committed results survive failures.

Atomicity is therefore a core mechanism behind Transactionality.

References

  1. Jim Gray, “The Transaction Concept: Virtues and Limitations” (1981): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-transaction-concept-virtues-and-limitations/
  2. Theo Haerder, Andreas Reuter, “Principles of Transaction-Oriented Database Recovery” (1983): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/357389.357413