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russt17

Serializability was a little confusing to me, here's my interpretation: Atomicity (all or nothing) guarantees that either all the writes happen, or none happen. But, with only atomicity you could have this:

Transaction_1 { write A write B }

Transaction_2 { write C write D }

Then, if the result was : write A write C write B write D we would have atomicity but not serializability, since the transaction writes were interleaved.

gryffolyon

If we use a pessimistic detection TM, wouldn't your sequence result in a livelock?

paluri

@russt17 Since you are all writing to different memory addresses, and there are no conflicts between Transaction 1 and 2, no matter how the two transactions interleave, I think they will still have serializability, because the end result will be the same as if they had occured serially.

@gryffolyon The transactions wouldn't abort though because they don't conflict at all, right?

gryffolyon

@paluri. Yes they do not conflict and hence no livelock.