An Overview of Data Isolation – Isolation in Database Systems

What Is Data Isolation?

What is data isolation? Data isolation plays an important role in data transaction and there are four levels of data isolation that can help users better access the same data at the same time.

The higher level you use; the fewer types of concurrency effects you may encounter. However, the higher level of data isolation requires more system resources and makes conflicts between transactions.

Data isolation can be the database-level property of the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability), designed to ensure data remains consistent and accurate.

Isolation in database can do more than you expect in data security. With the features and functions of data isolation, data isolation technology and techniques can enhance cyber resiliency. It can disconnect data from the network and create physical distance between it, adding a strong barrier against all kind of attacks.

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Some people may be familiar with the concept of air gap. Similar to isolation in in database system, an air gap is also known as an air wall to separate all potential dangers from the outside and protect critical data, known as security by isolation.

How Data Isolation Works?

When two database transactions are issued at the same time, they will operate on the database in an isolated way. One transaction will be performed first and then the other one proceeds. It is not pointed that which one will go first but data isolation can ensure no interference between them.

Since the working principle of data isolation is to have a temporary network connection with layered access controls, it is necessary to ensure the balance between the isolation techniques and business continuity demands.

What Are the Four Levels of Data Isolation?

As we mentioned above, data isolation has four levels that is used to limit users to access the data. These four levels have different operation methods, thus requiring different system resources.

Read uncommitted – It is the lowest or bottom-most isolation level. In this process, the data in one running transaction can be modified by other transactions and can be accessed before the changes have been made. You may encounter many errors in this stage, such as dirty read, lost updates, or phantom read.

Read committed – Different from read uncommitted, read committed allows the data to be accessed after the data has been committed to the database.

Repeatable reads – This type of isolation allows to see data committed before the transaction began, whether it is finished or not. It is closely related to serializable, but unlike it, it allows phantom reads.

Serializable – It is the highest isolation level. In this process, one transaction must complete before another transaction can start.

Why Is Data Isolation Important?

After learning the above introduction to data isolation, why is this technology so important to protect your cyber security? There are some great advantages that you can make a good use of.

1. It can provide control over the level of data consistency required by a particular application.
2. The different levels of data isolation enable users to enhance flexibility in different levels of data consistency.
3. Data isolation allows multiple transactions to run concurrently without interfering with each other.
4. With data isolation, an impenetrable barrier can be created to enhance data protection and prevent from accessing, stealing, or corrupting data.

Protect Your Data with MiniTool ShadowMaker

Although data isolation and air gap can greatly help protect against attack vectors, it is necessary to mention that these two techniques can’t prevent all potential dangers in this cyber world where new attacks are constantly emerging.

In this way, we highly recommended that you should prepare a backup plan for your important data in case of system crashes or data loss when encountering virus or malware infiltrations.

MiniTool ShadowMaker is free backup software that gets widely acknowledged among the world, attracting a bunch of fans. This software can help backup systems, files & folders, and partitions & disks. Apart from the backup feature, you can also use the file sync and clone disk features for your demands.

To improve the backup experience, you are allowed to use backup schedules and back schemes – Full, Incremental, and Differential backup.

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Wrapping It Up

After reading this article, you may have your understanding of data isolation. It is a useful tool to protect your data and system from cyber-attacks. To strengthen the protection, you can also apply a backup plan for your important data to prevent any data loss caused by potential dangers.