Description: The ‘Isolation Level’ refers to the degree to which operations within a transaction are isolated from operations of other transactions in a database management system. This concept is fundamental to ensuring data integrity and consistency in environments where multiple transactions may occur simultaneously. An appropriate isolation level allows transactions to execute in such a way that intermediate results are not visible to other transactions, thus avoiding issues such as dirty reads, non-repeatable reads, and phantom reads. Isolation levels are generally defined in terms of four categories: Read Uncommitted, Read Committed, Repeatable Read, and Serializable, each offering a different balance between performance and consistency. The choice of isolation level can significantly impact system performance and how transactions are managed, making it a critical aspect in the design of database applications that require high availability and data reliability.
