transaction

A collection of one or more SQL statements that must be treated as a single unit of work. The SQL statements within the transaction must all be successful for the transaction to succeed. If one of the statements in a transaction fails, the entire transaction can be rolled back (canceled). If the transaction is successful, the work is committed and all changes to the database from the transaction are accepted. The transaction log contains the changes made to the database during a transaction. If a database is not ANSI-compliant, it uses singleton transactions if it does not use a transaction log and it uses explicit transactions otherwise. If a database is ANSI-compliant, it uses implicit transactions.

See also ANSI-compliant, commit, explicit transaction, implicit transaction, log, roll back, singleton transaction.