Concurrency is the ability of the DBMS to process more than one transaction at a time.

This
section briefly overviews several problems that can occur when concurrent transactions execute
in an uncontrolled manner. Concrete examples are given to illustrate the problems in details. The
related activities and learning tasks that follow give you a chance to evaluate the extent of your
understanding of the problems. An important learning objective for this section of the chapter is
to understand the different types of problems of concurrent executions in OLTP, and appreciate
the need for concurrency control.
We illustrate some of the problems by referring to a simple airline reservation database in which
each record is stored for each airline flight. Each record includes the number of reserved seats
on that flight as a named data item, among other information. Recall the two transactions T1 and
T2 introduced previously: