Can you explain the concept of isolation in the context of databases or systems?

Isolation is one of the key characteristics of transactions in databases, ensuring the independence of parallel transaction execution.

It guarantees that intermediate changes made by one transaction are not visible to others until it is committed. This prevents issues such as:

• Dirty read
• Non-repeatable read
• Phantom read

Isolation levels (e.g., Read Uncommitted, Read Committed, Repeatable Read, Serializable) define the degree of strictness of these guarantees.

Example: if two transactions try to modify the same bank account simultaneously, isolation guarantees that the final balance will be correct and no operation will be lost.