ACID Properties

Abstract

The conceptual ACID properties (short for atomicity, isolation, consistency preservation, and durability) of a transaction together provide the key abstraction which allows application developers to disregard irregular or even malicious effects from concurrency or failures of transaction executions, as the transactional server in charge guarantees the consistency of the underlying data and ultimately the correctness of the application. For example, in a banking context where debit/credit transactions are executed this means that no money is ever lost in electronic funds transfers and customers can rely on electronic receipts and balance statements. These cornerstones for building highly dependable information systems can be successfully applied outside the scope of online transaction processing and classical database applications as well.