SQL Transactions: Ensuring Data Integrity

Transactions group multiple SQL operations into a single unit of work. Either all operations succeed (commit) or none do (rollback). This ensures data consistency even during failures.

Transactions follow ACID properties: Atomicity (all or nothing), Consistency (valid state transitions), Isolation (concurrent transactions don't interfere), Durability (committed data persists).

BEGIN TRANSACTION starts a transaction. COMMIT saves all changes. ROLLBACK undoes all changes since BEGIN. Savepoints allow partial rollbacks within a transaction.

Common use cases: transferring money between accounts (debit one, credit another), multi-step data migrations, and batch operations where partial completion would leave data in an inconsistent state.

While SQLite (used in CompileZ) has basic transaction support, the concepts apply to all SQL databases. Practice transaction patterns in the SQL editor.