Chapter 7. Transactions
This chapter covers
- Why transactions are important
- How Neo4j handles transactions
- How to integrate Neo4j with other transaction management systems
- How to take advantage of transaction events
Neo4j differs from some other NoSQL technologies by being fully ACID-compliant (ACID being an acronym for atomic, consistent, isolated, durable). Being fully ACID-compliant means Neo4j offers the same guarantees you’d have if you were working with a traditional relational database system.
It’s important to have ACID guarantees when you work with Neo4j because it’s commonplace to mutate a number of graph entities (nodes, relationships, and index entries) within the same transaction. It’s also easier to reason about the behavior of systems that are ACID-compliant compared to eventually consistent systems, where you have no real guarantees about when your changes will be visible across a cluster, and compared to technologies where there are no transactions and therefore partial results of a larger business operation may become temporarily visible to competing transactions. The durability aspect of ACID transactions also provides a high degree of confidence that once your transaction is committed, the data won’t be lost.
You’ve seen transactions being called in other chapters in this book. In this chapter we’ll explore transactions in more detail.