DB Transaction Design

Overview

Use this skill to design transaction behavior that protects invariants while avoiding avoidable contention and deadlocks.

Scope Boundaries

• Concurrent workflows must preserve business invariants.
• Anomalies (lost update, write skew, phantom) are possible.
• Lock contention or deadlocks are degrading reliability.

Core Judgments

• Transaction boundary: what must be atomic versus eventually consistent.
• Isolation level per workflow and anomaly tolerance.
• Locking strategy: optimistic, pessimistic, or hybrid.
• Retry/idempotency behavior under deadlock/timeouts.