In computer science, transaction processing is information processing

Atomicity

A transaction's changes to the state are atomic: either all happen or none happen. These changes include database changes, messages, and actions on transducers.

Consistency

Consistency: A transaction is a correct transformation of the state. The actions taken as a group do not violate any of the integrity constraints associated with the state.

Isolation

Even though transactions execute concurrently, it appears to each transaction T, that others executed either before T or after T, but not both.

Durability

Once a transaction completes successfully (commits), its changes to the database survive failures and retain its changes.

Implementations

Standard transaction-processing software, such as IBM's Information Management System, was first developed in the 1960s, and was often closely coupled to particular database management systems. Client–server computing implemented similar principles in the 1980s with mixed success. However, in more recent years, the distributed client–server model has become considerably more difficult to maintain. As the number of transactions grew in response to various online services (especially the Web), a single distributed database was not a practical solution. In addition, most online systems consist of a whole suite of programs operating together, as opposed to a strict client–server model where the single server could handle the transaction processing. Today a number of transaction processing systems are available that work at the inter-program level and which scale to large systems, including mainframes.

One effort is the X/Open Distributed Transaction Processing (DTP) (see also Java Transaction API (JTA). However, proprietary transaction-processing environments such as IBM's CICS are still very popular, although CICS has evolved to include open industry standards as well.

The term extreme transaction processing (XTP) was used to describe transaction processing systems with uncommonly challenging requirements, particularly throughput requirements (transactions per second). Such systems may be implemented via distributed or cluster style architectures. It was used at least by 2011.

References

Further reading

  • Gerhard Weikum, Gottfried Vossen, Transactional information systems: theory, algorithms, and the practice of concurrency control and recovery, Morgan Kaufmann, 2002,
  • Jim Gray, Andreas Reuter, Transaction Processing—Concepts and Techniques, 1993, Morgan Kaufmann,
  • Philip A. Bernstein, Eric Newcomer, Principles of Transaction Processing, 1997, Morgan Kaufmann,
  • Ahmed K. Elmagarmid (Editor), Transaction Models for Advanced Database Applications, Morgan-Kaufmann, 1992,
  • Nuts and Bolts of Transaction Processing (1999)
  • Managing Transaction Processing for SQL Database Integrity
  • Transaction Processing