Unit of work

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

• 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