MVCC stands for Multi-Version Concurrency Control. It is the basic transaction isolation idea that stands behind many transactional systems and allows different processes see different version of truth for the same data. Considering DBMS system, when you are running the query that performs “update” of a specific number of records in the table, you should guarantee specific transaction isolation: if you run “select” in parallel with this “update”, you most likely want this “select” to see the data that was in the table before the “update” has started and not the “dirty” data that was created by this “update” (that might be rollbacked as well as committed).
The solution to handle this particular problem is MVCC – you need to store a number of versions for each row of the table that got changed. This data should be stored somehow and somehow maintained. I will discuss a number of approaches to make it.
