Glossary / ACID

ACID

Practical PostgreSQL glossary entry with a clear definition, example, and benchmarking context.

What Is ACID?

ACID ensures reliable processing of database transactions through Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability. PostgreSQL adheres strictly to ACID compliance for high data integrity.

Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance

In PostgreSQL performance work, ACID affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.

Practical Benchmarking Context

When benchmarking with pgbench, track how ACID changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.

Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.

Example

Example: Bank transfers use ACID to guarantee both debit and credit succeed or fail together.

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