Software engineering · Operations & workflows
Atomic.
An operation completes as a whole or leaves none of its partial changes behind.
Useful when several changes must succeed together.
“Make creating the invoice and its line items atomic; a failure must leave neither behind.”
A closer look
A transaction can group several writes into one unit. If one write fails, the whole unit rolls back. Be explicit about the boundary: a database transaction does not automatically include an email already sent through an external service.
Put it to work
“Transfer the balance and record the ledger entry in one atomic transaction.”
A useful distinction
Atomicity is an all-or-nothing property. It does not by itself guarantee isolation from concurrent operations or safe repetition.