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arangodb/Documentation/Books/Users/Transactions/Durability.mdpp

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!CHAPTER Durability
Transactions are executed in main memory first until there is either a rollback
or a commit. On rollback, no data will be written to disk, but the operations
from the transaction will be reversed in memory.
On commit, all modifications done in the transaction will be written to the
collection datafiles. These writes will be synchronized to disk if any of the
modified collections has the *waitForSync* property set to *true*, or if any
individual operation in the transaction was executed with the *waitForSync*
attribute.
Additionally, transactions that modify data in more than one collection are
automatically synchronized to disk. This synchronization is done to not only
ensure durability, but to also ensure consistency in case of a server crash.
That means if you only modify data in a single collection, and that collection
has its *waitForSync* property set to *false*, the whole transaction will not
be synchronized to disk instantly, but with a small delay.
There is thus the potential risk of losing data between the commit of the
transaction and the actual (delayed) disk synchronization. This is the same as
writing into collections that have the *waitForSync* property set to *false*
outside of a transaction.
In case of a crash with *waitForSync* set to false, the operations performed in
the transaction will either be visible completely or not at all, depending on
whether the delayed synchronization had kicked in or not.
To ensure durability of transactions on a collection that have the *waitForSync*
property set to *false*, you can set the *waitForSync* attribute of the object
that is passed to *executeTransaction*. This will force a synchronization of the
transaction to disk even for collections that have *waitForSync* set to *false*:
db._executeTransaction({
collections: {
write: "users"
},
waitForSync: true,
action: function () { ... }
});
An alternative is to perform an operation with an explicit *sync* request in
a transaction, e.g.
db.users.save({ _key: "1234" }, true);
In this case, the *true* value will make the whole transaction be synchronized
to disk at the commit.
In any case, ArangoDB will give users the choice of whether or not they want
full durability for single collection transactions. Using the delayed synchronization
(i.e. *waitForSync* with a value of *false*) will potentially increase throughput
and performance of transactions, but will introduce the risk of losing the last
committed transactions in the case of a crash.
In contrast, transactions that modify data in more than one collection are
automatically synchronized to disk. This comes at the cost of several disk sync
For a multi-collection transaction, the call to the *_executeTransaction* function
will only return only after the data of all modified collections has been synchronized
to disk and the transaction has been made fully durable. This not only reduces the
risk of losing data in case of a crash but also ensures consistency after a
restart.
In case of a server crash, any multi-collection transactions that were not yet
committed or in preparation to be committed will be rolled back on server restart.
For multi-collection transactions, there will be at least one disk sync operation
per modified collection. Multi-collection transactions thus have a potentially higher
cost than single collection transactions. There is no configuration to turn off disk
synchronization for multi-collection transactions in ArangoDB.
The disk sync speed of the system will thus be the most important factor for the
performance of multi-collection transactions.