I was confused about the difference between a commit operation and a checkpoint. I referred to some of the articles like This Article
But they are advanced for my understanding. I mean both appear to be same i.e. saving data like a "Save" action. If we rollback, we can rollback only to the most recent checkpoint/commit. Am I right in my statements? Can someone explain?
Best Answer
A commit is a user initiated action that tells the database (Oracle in this case) that the transaction is completed and that the changes may be committed and any locks/resources released. Normally the changes are committed to in memory data buffers and to the redo log buffer.
A checkpoint though is a database initiated action that writes all of the data to the actual physical disk file based on the changes recorded in the redo log buffer. Some good articles can be found here and here.