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PostgreSQL Glossary

Atomicity

The property that ensures all operations within a transaction are completed successfully, or none are applied at all. Example: If transferring money betwe…

Definition

The property that ensures all operations within a transaction are completed successfully, or none are applied at all.

What Atomicity Means in PostgreSQL

The property that ensures all operations within a transaction are completed successfully, or none are applied at all.

Atomicity appears frequently in production operations, architecture decisions, and troubleshooting workflows. Understanding this term helps teams reason about reliability, performance, and safe change management.

Why Atomicity Matters

Teams that understand Atomicity can make better decisions on database design, incident response, and release safety.

In modern PostgreSQL environments, this concept often connects directly to backup strategy, performance tuning, and operational confidence.

  • Improves decision quality for production operations
  • Reduces avoidable troubleshooting time
  • Strengthens reliability and recovery planning

Practical Example

If transferring money between accounts fails halfway through, atomicity ensures no partial changes are saved.

Where To Learn More

You can explore deeper implementation patterns in the Vela articles library, review platform workflows in How Vela Works, and compare approaches in our PostgreSQL comparisons.

Related Glossary Topics

ACID Archiving (WAL Archiving) archive_command archive_mode BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) B-tree Index Backup (Logical vs Physical) Base Backup

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Atomicity in PostgreSQL?
The property that ensures all operations within a transaction are completed successfully, or none are applied at all.
Why is Atomicity important?
Atomicity matters because it directly affects how teams build, operate, and recover PostgreSQL systems in production.
Can you give a practical Atomicity example?
If transferring money between accounts fails halfway through, atomicity ensures no partial changes are saved.
How does Atomicity relate to backup, recovery, or performance?
In most production deployments, Atomicity influences one or more of these areas: data safety, restore behavior, and performance under load.
What should teams check first when implementing Atomicity?
Start with clear operational goals, test in a non-production environment, and validate behavior with repeatable runbooks before relying on it in production.