MySQL (InnoDB) transactions are ACID, with A for atomicity. An atomic transaction is an indivisible and irreducible series of database operations such that either all occur, or nothing occurs The atomicity here is different from the atomicity in concurrent programming. An operation acting on shared memory is atomic if it completes in a single step relative to other threads. Suppose you want to read a number from a column, add it by an offset, and write it back to the same column.

I have to admit I am really clumsy when it comes to SQL related stuff. This is the year of 2019, and SQL is not a fancy technology to learn anymore. I managed to get away with not diving deep into SQL for a long time, but the lack of fluency in SQL bites me quite often recently. Yesterday I was forced into a binlog trace of the production MySQL database.