serializability · shipping · also Serializable isolation

Serializability

Serializability is a transaction-isolation property under which the read results and writes of committed concurrent transactions are equivalent to some serial execution of those transactions.

The equivalent order need not preserve real-time precedence; strict serializability adds that constraint. This does not require executing transactions physically one at a time. PostgreSQL's Serializable mode can abort a transaction to prevent a serialization anomaly, so applications must handle retries. Neither the term nor a read option named serializable independently specifies durability. Matching final values alone is not enough to establish equivalence. Snapshot isolation can allow write skew across different rows.

Relations

related

linearizability, compare-and-swap, snapshot-isolation, write-skew

Citations

1. Maurice P. Herlihy and Jeannette M. Wing. Linearizability: A Correctness Condition for Concurrent Objects. ACM TOPLAS 12(3), 1990, sections 2.2 and 3.3. (accessed 2026-10-12)
2. PostgreSQL 18 documentation, section 13.2: Transaction Isolation. (accessed 2026-10-12)
3. etcd v3.6 API guarantees: durability, strict serializability and operation completion. (accessed 2026-10-12)
4. Storage consistency: ordering is not a transaction or a durability promise (accessed 2026-10-12)
5. Hal Berenson et al. A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels. ACM SIGMOD 1995; MSR-TR-95-51, section 4.2. (accessed 2026-10-12)

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