Atomicity is the guarantee that series of database operations in an atomic transaction will either all occur (a successful operation), or none will occur (an unsuccessful operation). The series of operations cannot be separated with only some of them being executed, which makes the series of operations "indivisible".

How do atomic transactions work?

Atomic - it is one unit of work and does not dependent on previous and following transactions. Consistent - data is either committed or roll back, no “in-between” case where something has been updated and something hasn't. Isolated - no transaction sees the intermediate results of the current transaction.

How is atomicity implemented?

Implementation. Typically, systems implement Atomicity by providing some mechanism to indicate which transactions have started and which finished; or by keeping a copy of the data before any changes occurred (read-copy-update). ... Databases usually implement this using some form of logging/journaling to track changes.