What are transactions in database management systems designed to ensure?

In database management systems, transactions are designed to ensure data integrity, which is crucial for maintaining the accuracy and consistency of the data stored. A transaction represents a unit of work that must either be fully completed or fully rolled back to maintain the state of the database. This concept is often referenced through the ACID properties: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability.

• Atomicity guarantees that a transaction is all-or-nothing. If part of the transaction fails, the entire transaction is abandoned, ensuring that the database does not end up in a half-finished state.

• Consistency ensures that any transaction will bring the database from one valid state to another, maintaining all predefined rules, including constraints and cascades, thereby protecting the integrity of the data.

• Isolation ensures that concurrently executed transactions do not interfere with each other, which is vital in multi-user environments.

• Durability means that once a transaction has been committed, it will remain so, even in the case of system failures.

Thus, the design of transactions directly focuses on providing safeguards that maintain data integrity, making it the correct answer in this context. Other options such as data presentation, visualization, and compression focus on different aspects of data management but do not directly address the