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Transactions and Concurrency Control

GATE CSE 2025 Set 2 · Q27

MSQ1 markMedium

Time

An audit of a banking transactions system has found that on an earlier occasion, two joint holders of account AA attempted simultaneous transfers of Rs. 10000 each from account AA to account BB. Both transactions read the same value, Rs. 11000, as the initial balance in AA and were allowed to go through. BB was credited Rs. 10000 twice. AA was debited only once and ended up with a balance of Rs. 1000.

Which of the following properties is/are certain to have been violated by the system?

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Solution

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Official answer: B) Consistency; C) Isolation

Transactions and Concurrency Control

Let the two concurrent transactions be T1T_1 and T2T_2.

  1. Isolation Violation:

    • Both transactions read the balance of account AA concurrently as Rs. 11000 before either transaction committed its update.

    • Both wrote back 11000−10000=100011000 - 10000 = 1000 to AA, leading to a Lost Update anomaly.

    • Because intermediate/concurrent states interfered with each other, the Isolation property was clearly violated.

  2. Consistency Violation:

    • The integrity constraint for a transfer requires that the sum of balances (A+B)(A + B) remains invariant before and after the transactions.

    • Total deducted from AA is Rs. 10000, while total credited to BB is Rs. 20000, creating Rs. 10000 out of nowhere.

    • This violates the system's consistency constraints, so the Consistency property was violated.

  3. Atomicity and Durability:

    • Atomicity requires that all operations of each individual transaction complete successfully or none do. Here, each individual transaction executed its operations (the overwrite occurred due to lack of concurrency control/isolation, not transaction aborts or partial execution).

    • Durability ensures committed changes survive system crashes, which is not violated here.

Hence, B and C are the properties certain to have been violated.

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This Transactions and Concurrency Control previous year question is Q27 of the GATE CSE 2025 Set 2 paper. Find more GATE CSE PYQs on Transactions and Concurrency Control in Databases, or browse all GATE CSE PYQs.

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Transactions and Concurrency Control in GATE CSE

Transactions and Concurrency Control has 25 GATE CSE PYQs across 20 papers from 2012 to 2026. 3 of them are 1-mark MSQs like this one, and GATE CSE 2025 Set 2 has 2.

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GateAI solution cardGATE CSE 2025 Set 2 · Q27 · MSQ

An audit of a banking transactions system has found that on an earlier occasion, two joint holders of account A attempted simultaneous transfers of Rs. 10000 each from account A to account B. Both transactions read the same value, Rs. 11000, as the initial balance in A and were allowed to go through. B was credited Rs. 10000 twice. A was debited only once and ended up with a balance of Rs. 1000. Which of the following properties is/are certain to have been violated by the system?

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Independent practice explanation verified by the GateAI team. GATE is conducted by the IITs; question text follows the official paper.