SQL Server Isolation Levels

       Isolation level is required to isolate a resource and protect it from other transactions. This is achieved with the help of locks but what locks are needed and how they can be established is decided on the isolation level set on the database level. If low level of Isolation is set, it allows multiple users to access the resources concurrently but it may result in many  concurrency related problems like phantom reads, dirty reads etc. If higher levels of Isolation is set then it eliminate the concurrency related problem but it results in less number of concurrent access and it may result in data blocking.

Isolation levels in SQL Server control the way locking works between transactions.

SQL Server 2008 supports the following isolation levels

·         Read Uncommitted

·         Read Committed (The default)

·         Repeatable Read

·         Serializable

·         Snapshot

Before I run through each of these in detail you may want to create a new database to run the examples, run the following script on the new database to create the sample data. 

Note : You’ll also want to drop the IsolationTests table and re-run this script before each example to reset the data.

CREATE TABLE IsolationTests 

(

    Id INT IDENTITY,

    Col1 INT,

    Col2 INT,

    Col3 INTupdate te

)

INSERT INTO IsolationTests(Col1,Col2,Col3) 

SELECT 1,2,3 

UNION ALL SELECT 1,2,3 

UNION ALL SELECT 1,2,3 

UNION ALL SELECT 1,2,3 

UNION ALL SELECT 1,2,3 

UNION ALL SELECT 1,2,3 

UNION ALL SELECT 1,2,3

Also before we go any further it is important to understand these terms….

1. Dirty reads: - This situation happens when a transaction tries to read a data by some other concurrent transaction which is not committed yet. There is a risk, that this other transaction may never be committed, leaving the original transaction with wrong data.

2. Lost updates: - It happens when more than one transaction tries to update the same data. In Lost update, a successfully updated value of a data written in the database is overrides accidentally by the some another transaction updating the same data concurrently. 

3. Repeatable reads: - Repeatable reads condition occurs when a transaction tries to read a data multiple times and between the two reads, another transaction modified that data. Therefore when the original transaction tries to read that data second time, it find different value for that data. In other words, the original transaction reads two different values for the same data. 

4. Phantom reads:-This condition happen when a transaction needs to execute a same query twice (or multiple times) and it gets different set of rows from what it get earlier due to the execution of the query first time. This happens if some another transaction add or delete rows between the two executions of the query and these added/deleted rows are the part of the record set reruns by  the execution of the query.

Read Uncommitted

             This is the lowest isolation level there is. Read uncommitted causes no shared locks to be requested which allows you to read data that is currently being modified in other transactions. It also allows other transactions to modify data that you are reading.

As you can probably imagine this can cause some unexpected results in a variety of different ways. For example data returned by the select could be in a half way state if an update was running in another transaction causing some of your rows to come back with the updated values and some not to. It may results in problem like dirty read, lost updates, phantom reads etc. It is the least restrictive Isolation level.

To see read uncommitted in action lets run Query1 in one tab of Management Studio and then quickly run Query2 in another tab before Query1 completes.

Query1

BEGIN TRAN 

UPDATE IsolationTests SET Col1 = 2 

--Simulate having some intensive processing here with a wait

WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:10' 

ROLLBACK

Query2

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED 

SELECT * FROM IsolationTests

Notice that Query2 will not wait for Query1 to finish, also more importantly Query2 returns dirty data. Remember Query1 rolls back all its changes however Query2 has returned the data anyway, this is because it didn't wait for all the other transactions with exclusive locks on this data it just returned what was there at the time.

There is a syntactic shortcut for querying data using the read uncommitted isolation level by using the NOLOCK table hint. You could change the above Query2 to look like this and it would do the exact same thing.

SELECT * FROM IsolationTests WITH(NOLOCK)

Read Committed

This is the default isolation level and means selects will only return committed data. Select statements will issue shared lock requests against data you’re querying this causes you to wait if another transaction already has an exclusive lock on that data. Once you have your shared lock any other transactions trying to modify that data will request an exclusive lock and be made to wait until your Read Committed transaction finishes. Thus it eliminates the problem of Dirty read. But it do not eliminates the occurrence of Phantom reads and Repeatable reads.

You can see an example of a read transaction waiting for a modify transaction to complete before returning the data by running the following Queries in separate tabs as you did with Read Uncommitted.

Query1

BEGIN TRAN 

UPDATE Tests SET Col1 = 2 

--Simulate having some intensive processing here with a wait

WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:10' 

ROLLBACK

Query2

SELECT * FROM IsolationTests

Notice how Query2 waited for the first transaction to complete before returning and also how the data returned is the data we started off with as Query1 did a rollback. The reason no isolation level was specified is because Read Committed is the default isolation level for SQL Server. If you want to check what isolation level you are running under you can run “DBCC useroptions”. Remember isolation levels are Connection/Transaction specific so different queries on the same database are often run under different isolation levels.

Repeatable Read

This is similar to Read Committed but with the additional guarantee that if you issue the same select twice in a transaction you will get the same results both times. It does this by holding on to the shared locks it obtains on the records it reads until the end of the transaction, This means any transactions that try to modify these records are forced to wait for the read transaction to complete. This way it eliminates the dirty read and Repeatable reads problem but it doesn't eliminates the Phantom reads.

As before run Query1 then while its running run Query2

Query1

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL REPEATABLE READ 

BEGIN TRAN 

SELECT * FROM IsolationTests 

WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:10' 

SELECT * FROM IsolationTests 

ROLLBACK

Query2

UPDATE IsolationTests SET Col1 = -1

Notice that Query1 returns the same data for both selects even though you ran a query to modify the data before the second select ran. This is because the Update query was forced to wait for Query1 to finish due to the exclusive locks that were opened as you specified Repeatable Read.

If you rerun the above Queries but change Query1 to Read Committed you will notice the two selects return different data and that Query2 does not wait for Query1 to finish.

One last thing to know about Repeatable Read is that the data can change between 2 queries if more records are added. Repeatable Read guarantees records queried by a previous select will not be changed or deleted, it does not stop new records being inserted so it is still very possible to get Phantom Reads at this isolation level.

Serializable

This isolation level takes Repeatable Read and adds the guarantee that no new data will be added eradicating the chance of getting Phantom Reads. It does this by placing range locks on the queried data. This causes any other transactions trying to modify or insert data touched on by this transaction to wait until it has finished.

You know the drill by now run these queries side by side…

Query1

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SERIALIZABLE 

BEGIN TRAN 

SELECT * FROM IsolationTests 

WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:10' 

SELECT * FROM IsolationTests 

ROLLBACK

Query2

INSERT INTO IsolationTests(Col1,Col2,Col3) 

VALUES (100,100,100)

You’ll see that the insert in Query2 waits for Query1 to complete before it runs eradicating the chance of a phantom read. If you change the isolation level in Query1 to repeatable read, you’ll see the insert no longer gets blocked and the two select statements in Query1 return a different amount of rows.

Snapshot

This provides the same guarantees as serializable. So what's the difference? Well it’s more in the way it works, using snapshot doesn't block other queries from inserting or updating the data touched by the snapshot transaction. Instead row versioning is used so when data is changed the old version is kept in tempdb so existing transactions will see the version without the change. When all transactions that started before the changes are complete the previous row version is removed from tempdb. This means that even if another transaction has made changes you will always get the same results as you did the first time in that transaction.

So on the plus side your not blocking anyone else from modifying the data whilst you run your transaction but…. You’re using extra resources on the SQL Server to hold multiple versions of your changes.

To use the snapshot isolation level you need to enable it on the database by running the following command

ALTER DATABASE IsolationTests 

SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON

If you rerun the examples from serializable but change the isolation level to snapshot you will notice that you still get the same data returned but Query2 no longer waits for Query1 to complete.

Summary

       You should now have a good idea how each of the different isolation levels work. You can see how the higher the level you use the less concurrency you are offering and the more blocking you bring to the table. You should always try to use the lowest isolation level you can which is usually read committed.