To process transactions concurrently, the database server must execute some component statements of one transaction, then some from other transactions, before continuing to process further operations from the first. The order in which the component operations of the various transactions are interleaved is called the schedule.

Applying transactions concurrently in this manner can result in many possible outcomes, including the three particular inconsistencies described in the previous section. Sometimes, the final state of the database also could have been achieved had the transactions been executed sequentially, meaning that one transaction was always completed in its entirety before the next was started. A schedule is called serializable whenever executing the transactions sequentially, in some order, could have left the database in the same state as the actual schedule.

Serializability is the commonly accepted criterion for correctness. A serializable schedule is accepted as correct because the database is not influenced by the concurrent execution of the transactions.

The isolation level affects a transaction's serializability. At isolation level 3, all schedules are serializable. The default setting is 0.

 Serializable means that concurrency has added no effect

 Unserializable schedules introduce inconsistencies