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Isolation Levels in the Database Engine

Transactions specify an isolation level that defines the degree to which one transaction must be isolated from resource or data modifications made by other transactions. Isolation levels are described in terms of which concurrency side-effects, such as dirty reads or phantom reads, are allowed.

Transaction isolation levels control:

  • Whether locks are taken when data is read, and what type of locks are requested.

  • How long the read locks are held.

  • Whether a read operation referencing rows modified by another transaction:

    • Blocks until the exclusive lock on the row is freed.

    • Retrieves the committed version of the row that existed at the time the statement or transaction started.

    • Reads the uncommitted data modification.

Choosing a transaction isolation level does not affect the locks acquired to protect data modifications. A transaction always gets an exclusive lock on any data it modifies, and holds that lock until the transaction completes, regardless of the isolation level set for that transaction. For read operations, transaction isolation levels primarily define the level of protection from the effects of modifications made by other transactions.

A lower isolation level increases the ability of many users to access data at the same time, but increases the number of concurrency effects (such as dirty reads or lost updates) users might encounter. Conversely, a higher isolation level reduces the types of concurrency effects that users may encounter, but requires more system resources and increases the chances that one transaction will block another. Choosing the appropriate isolation level depends on balancing the data integrity requirements of the application against the overhead of each isolation level. The highest isolation level, serializable, guarantees that a transaction will retrieve exactly the same data every time it repeats a read operation, but it does this by performing a level of locking that is likely to impact other users in multi-user systems. The lowest isolation level, read uncommitted, may retrieve data that has been modified but not committed by other transactions. All of the concurrency side effects can happen in read uncommitted, but there is no read locking or versioning, so overhead is minimized.

Database Engine Isolation Levels

The ISO standard defines the following isolation levels, all of which are supported by the SQL Server Database Engine:

  • Read uncommitted (the lowest level where transactions are isolated only enough to ensure that physically corrupt data is not read)

  • Read committed (Database Engine default level)

  • Repeatable read

  • Serializable (the highest level, where transactions are completely isolated from one another)

Important

DDL operations and transactions on replicated tables may fail when serializable isolation level is requested. This is because replication queries use hints that may be incompatible with serializable isolation level.

SQL Server also supports two transaction isolation levels that use row versioning. One is a new implementation of read committed isolation, and one is a new transaction isolation level, snapshot.

  • When the READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT database option is set ON, read committed isolation uses row versioning to provide statement-level read consistency. Read operations require only SCH-S table level locks and no page or row locks. When the READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT database option is set OFF, which is the default setting, read committed isolation behaves as it did in earlier versions of SQL Server. Both implementations meet the ANSI definition of read committed isolation.

  • The snapshot isolation level uses row versioning to provide transaction-level read consistency. Read operations acquire no page or row locks; only SCH-S table locks are acquired. When reading rows modified by another transaction, they retrieve the version of the row that existed when the transaction started. You can only use Snapshot isolation against a database when the ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION database option is set ON. By default, this option is set OFF for user databases.

Note

SQL Server does not support versioning of metadata. For this reason, there are restrictions on what DDL operations can be performed in an explicit transaction that is running under snapshot isolation. The following DDL statements are not permitted under snapshot isolation after a BEGIN TRANSACTION statement: ALTER TABLE, CREATE INDEX, CREATE XML INDEX, ALTER INDEX, DROP INDEX, DBCC REINDEX, ALTER PARTITION FUNCTION, ALTER PARTITION SCHEME, or any common language runtime (CLR) DDL statement. These statements are permitted when you are using snapshot isolation within implicit transactions. An implicit transaction, by definition, is a single statement that makes it possible to enforce the semantics of snapshot isolation, even with DDL statements. Violations of this principle can cause error 3961: "Snapshot isolation transaction failed in database '%.*ls' because the object accessed by the statement has been modified by a DDL statement in another concurrent transaction since the start of this transaction. It is not allowed because the metadata is not versioned. A concurrent update to metadata could lead to inconsistency if mixed with snapshot isolation."

The following table shows the concurrency side effects enabled by the different isolation levels.

Isolation level

Dirty read

Nonrepeatable read

Phantom

Read uncommitted

Yes

Yes

Yes

Read committed

No

Yes

Yes

Repeatable read

No

No

Yes

Snapshot

No

No

No

Serializable

No

No

No

For more information about the specific types of locking or row versioning controlled by each transaction isolation level, see SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL (Transact-SQL).