🧩 All or Nothing

Keep business operations atomic with transactions.

FreeData Integrity7 min read

Either it fully happens or it does not happen at all.

Moving money should never leave half a move.

If you move 10 coins from your pocket to a friend, it should not vanish from you without arriving to them. A transaction makes the whole move succeed or not happen.

💡 Key ideas

Do related changes together
If one part fails, undo everything
Never leave half-finished records that look done

🛠️ How to apply it

Wrap related writes in one transaction.
Never split a business step across two saves.

Reading level: 🐣 Simple

A business operation is one unit, not four database calls.

Identify the smallest business operation that must succeed or fail as one unit. Inside a transaction: validate, apply changes, commit; on unrecoverable error, roll back.

💡 Key ideas

Avoid unnecessary commits in the middle of a business transaction
Do not leave partially-created records that appear successful
Do not hold a transaction across external APIs, email, payments or queues

🛠️ How to apply it

Keep the transaction short: only the atomic database work
Hand off slow side effects to durable events/jobs with idempotent handlers

⚠️ Common pitfalls

Wrapping an email call or third-party API inside a database transaction

Reading level: 🚀 Standard

Transactions guarantee local atomicity — not distributed atomicity.

ACID gives you isolation and all-or-nothing within one database. Once a workflow spans systems, you need a pattern: transactional outbox, sagas, or compensation — plus idempotent, retry-safe steps.

💡 Key ideas

Model the boundary: what must be atomic, and what can be eventually consistent
Outbox pattern: commit business data + outbox event in one transaction, then publish
Compensation is not rollback — design the compensating action explicitly

🛠️ How to apply it

Emit side-effect intents inside the same transaction (outbox) for reliability
Ensure every downstream handler is idempotent so redelivery is safe

⚠️ Common pitfalls

Assuming a "transaction" spans your API call and a payment gateway
Long-held locks causing contention and timeouts under load

Reading level: 🧠 Deep

Try it yourself

All-or-Nothing Transfer — a live simulator for this principle.

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