Unit of work

Concept in software engineering

Not to be confused with Work unit.

Not to be confused with Joule.

A unit of work[1] is a behavioral pattern in software development. Martin Fowler has defined it as everything one does during a business transaction which can affect the database.[2] When the unit of work is finished, it will provide everything that needs to be done to change the database as a result of the work.[2]

A unit of work encapsulates one or more code repositories[de] and a list of actions to be performed which are necessary for the successful implementation of self-contained and consistent data change. A unit of work is also responsible for handling concurrency issues,[3][4] and can be used for transactions[3][4] and stability patterns.[de][5]

## See also

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* ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability), a set of properties of database transactions
* Database transaction, a unit of work within a database management system
* Equi-join, a type of join where only equal signs are used in the join predicate
* Lossless join decomposition, decomposition of a relation such that a natural join of the resulting relations yields back the original relation

## References

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1. ^ Martin Fowler. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. ISBN 0-321-12742-0.
2. ^ a b Martin Fowler (2002), Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Amsterdam: Addison-Wesley-Longman, ISBN 0-321-12742-0
3. ^ a b Martin Fowler. "Unit of Work". Retrieved 2018-03-08.
4. ^ a b "Unit of Work". Portland Pattern Repository. Retrieved 2018-03-08.
5. ^ Michael T. Nygard (2007), Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software, O’Reilly, ISBN 978-0-9787392-1-8