Shadow paging is a technique used to achieve atomic and durable transactions, and provides the ability to manipulate pages in a database. During a transaction, the pages affected by the transaction are copied from the database file into a workspace, such as volatile memory, and modified in that workspace. When a transaction is committed, all of the pages that were modified by the transaction are written from the workspace to unused pages in the database file. During execution of the transaction, the state of the database exposed to the user is that in which the database existed prior to the transaction, since the database file still contains the original versions of the modified pages, as they existed before being copied into the workspace. If a user accesses the database before the transaction is complete, or upon recovery of a failure, it will appear as though the transaction has not occurred.