Encyclopedia > Atomic (computer science)

  Article Content

Atomic (computer science)

In computer science, an atomic operation is one that either completes fully, or has no lasting effect. It is a slightly ambigious term:

  • in database systems, it is one of the ACID properties. In this context, "atomic" means nothing more than the above definition.

  • in other areas of computer science such as operating systems, "atomic" also refers to the property that the changes made by an operation are only visible after it completes. That is, that there are no intermediate states visible to other threads. In database systems, this property is described separately as isolation[?].



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
UU

... a disambiguation page; that is, one that just points to other pages that might otherwise have the same name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 25 ms