Unit of work explained

Unit of work should not be confused with Work unit.

Unit of work should not 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. 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.

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,^{[2] [3]} and can be used for transactions and stability patterns.^[de]

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

References

1. Book: 0-321-12742-0. Martin Fowler. en. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
2. Web site: 2018-03-08. Martin Fowler. en. Unit of Work.
3. Web site: 2018-03-08. en. Unit of Work. Portland Pattern Repository.