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.

Practitioner Heuristics

• Keep transactions as short as possible while preserving invariants.
• Choose isolation by anomaly risk, not blanket highest level.
• Model retries as business behavior with idempotent operations.
• External network calls inside DB transactions are a major anti-pattern.

Workflow

1. Identify critical invariants and concurrent access patterns.
2. Define transaction boundaries per use case.
3. Map anomaly risks and select isolation/locking strategy.
4. Design timeout, retry, and deadlock-handling behavior.
5. Evaluate contention hotspots and redesign access ordering if needed.
6. Record assumptions and triggers for revisiting transaction policy.

Common Failure Modes

• Broad transaction scopes serialize unrelated work.
• Retry logic replays side effects without idempotency guard.
• Isolation is changed to fix symptoms without invariant analysis.

Failure Conditions

• Stop when invariants cannot be mapped to transaction boundaries.
• Stop when retry behavior can duplicate irreversible side effects.
• Escalate when contention cannot be controlled without workflow redesign.