Transactions

YugabyteDB is a transactional database that supports distributed transactions. A transaction is a sequence of operations performed as a single logical unit of work. A transaction has four key properties: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability (ACID).

The following table summarizes the support for transactions across the YSQL and YCQL APIs.

Property	YSQL	YCQL	Comments
Distributed transactions	Yes	Yes	Perform multi-row or multi-table transactions.
An application can connect to any node of the cluster.
Isolation levels	Serializable
Snapshot
Read Committed	Snapshot	Repeatable read isolation level in PostgreSQL maps to snapshot isolation in YSQL.
AUTOCOMMIT = false setting	Yes	No	The transaction must be expressed as one statement in YCQL.

<div class="row"> <div class="col-12 col-md-6 col-lg-12 col-xl-6"> <a class="section-link icon-offset" href="distributed-transactions-ysql/"> <div class="head"> <div class="icon"><i class="fa-solid fa-sitemap"></i></div> <div class="title">Distributed transactions</div> </div> <div class="body"> Distributed transactions in YugabyteDB. </div> </a> </div> <div class="col-12 col-md-6 col-lg-12 col-xl-6"> <a class="section-link icon-offset" href="isolation-levels/"> <div class="head"> <div class="icon"><i class="fa-solid fa-bars-staggered"></i></div> <div class="title">Isolation levels</div> </div> <div class="body"> Serializable, snapshot, and read committed isolation in YugabyteDB. </div> </a> </div> <div class="col-12 col-md-6 col-lg-12 col-xl-6"> <a class="section-link icon-offset" href="explicit-locking/"> <div class="head"> <div class="icon"><i class="fa-solid fa-lock"></i></div> <div class="title">Explicit locking</div> </div> <div class="body"> Explicit row-level locking in YSQL. </div> </a> </div> <!-- ADD THIS ONCE READY: <div class="col-12 col-md-6 col-lg-12 col-xl-6"> <a class="section-link icon-offset" href="ddl-operations/"> <div class="head"> <div class="icon"><i class="fa-solid fa-table"></i></div> <div class="title">DDL Operations</div> </div> <div class="body"> How YugabyteDB handles DDL operations in transaction blocks. </div> </a> </div> <div class="col-12 col-md-6 col-lg-12 col-xl-6"> <a class="section-link icon-offset" href="non-transactional-tables/"> <div class="head"> <div class="icon"><i class="fa-solid fa-strikethrough"></i></div> <div class="title">Non-Transactional Tables</div> </div> <div class="body"> Disable multi-row transactions on a per-table basis in YCQL. </div> </a> </div> --> </div>