jargon

Backend & systems·Transactions and isolation

you read a value another transaction had written but not committed, and then it rolled back and the value never existed.

Dirty read

Seeing uncommitted state from a concurrent transaction. Almost every database prevents it by default, so it is mostly an interview term — but it is the anomaly people mean when they say a level is "unsafe", and it is the baseline the other anomalies are defined against.

Commonly confused with