Suppose you use your database to handle financial accounts, and you want to transfer money from one client's account to another. The database is in a consistent state both before and after the money is transferred; but it is not in a consistent state after you have debited money from one account and before you have credited it to the second. During a transfer of money, the database is in a consistent state when the total amount of money in the clients' accounts is as it was before any money was transferred. When the money has been half transferred, the database is in an inconsistent state. Either both or neither of the debit and the credit must be processed.

A transaction is a logical unit of work. Each transaction is a sequence of logically related commands that do one task and transform the database from one consistent state into another. The nature of a consistent state depends on your database.

The statements within a transaction are treated as an indivisible unit: either all are executed or none is executed. At the end of each transaction, you commit your changes to make them permanent. If for any reason some of the commands in the transaction do not process properly, then any intermediate changes are undone, or rolled back. Another way of saying this is that transactions are atomic.

Grouping statements into transactions is key both to protecting the consistency of your data (even in the event of media or system failure), and to managing concurrent database operations. Transactions may be safely interleaved and the completion of each transaction marks a point at which the information in the database is consistent. You should design each transaction to perform a task that changes your database from one consistent state to another.

In the event of a system failure or database crash during normal operation, SQL Anywhere performs automatic recovery of your data when the database is next started. The automatic recovery process recovers all completed transactions, and rolls back any transactions that were uncommitted when the failure occurred. The atomic character of transactions ensures that databases are recovered to a consistent state.

For more information about database backups and data recovery, see Backup and data recovery.

For more information about concurrent database usage, see Introduction to concurrency.