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Transactional applications

WiredTiger offers standard ACID-style transaction support where modifications happen at snapshot isolation and subsequently become durable. (Readers not already familiar with these concepts may wish to see Tutorial: transactions and ACID properties for a brief discussion of ACID and Tutorial: isolation levels for a brief discussion of isolation levels.)

There are three approaches to writing transactional programs in WiredTiger:

  1. Applications supporting checkpoint-level durability, intended for applications with simple transactions where updates become durable when the last reference to the object is closed or at the next database checkpoint.
  2. Applications supporting commit-level durability, which extends checkpoint-level durability, adding logging to the database so updates written on behalf of a transaction become durable as soon as the transaction's log records become durable.
  3. Applications using timestamps for fine-grained control of the database, extending checkpoint-level durability. This allows applications to do things like enforce a transactional commit order, read historical data and define stability points for the entire database. Use of timestamps changes both the consistency and durability models.

The first two approaches are relatively simple and have APIs which will be familiar to database developers. The principal difference is that in the second approach, applications may need to enclose operations in explicit transactional API calls and must additionally configure and manage the log files required for commit-level durability. The third approach is complex, has non-standard APIs, and requires more database knowledge to successfully build applications. The functionality and programmatic changes in each approach are additive. If this is your first database application, building a complex application by starting at the first approach and iterating to a complete application is recommended.

We will discuss these approaches in order, from the simplest to the most complex.

If this is your first WiredTiger application, please read Durability overview for a discussion of WiredTiger durability models, so you can select the application architecture that is appropriate for your needs.

Warning
Recovery is the process of restoring the database to a transactionally consistent state after failure. Recovery is automatically performed by WiredTiger, as necessary, when a database is opened. Recovery is required after the failure of any thread of control in the application, where the failed thread might have been executing inside of the WiredTiger library or open WiredTiger handles have been lost. If any application thread of control exits unexpectedly while holding any database resources of any kind, the application should close and re-open the database.