Understanding Innodb Transaction Isolation

• Ronald Bradford
• September 24, 2009

The MySQL Innodb storage engine provides ACID compliance, the ‘I’ being isolation. There are four states defined in MySQL with the tx_isolation system variable, READ-UNCOMMITTED, READ-COMMITTED, REPEATABLE-READ and SERIALIZABLE. Generally MySQL installations do not modify the default value of tx_isolation = REPEATABLE-READ, however I have seen with a number of clients the default value has been changed to READ-COMMITTED.