Transaction Processing

The key to client/server computing. Transaction processing techniques are deeply ingrained in the fields of databases and operating systems and are used to monitor, control and update information in modern computer systems. This book will show you how large, distributed, heterogeneous computer systems can be made to work reliably. Using transactions as a unifying conceptual framework, the authors show how to build high-performance distributed systems and high-availability applications with finite budgets and risk. The authors provide detailed explanations of why various problems occur as well as practical, usable techniques for their solution. Throughout the book, examples and techniques are drawn from the most successful commercial and research systems. Extensive use of compilable C code fragments demonstrates the many transaction processing algorithms presented in the book. The book will be valuable to anyone interested in implementing distributed systems or client/server architectures.

Principles of Transaction Processing is a comprehensive guide to developing applications, designing systems, and evaluating engineering products. The book provides detailed discussions of the internal workings of transaction processing systems, and it discusses how these systems work and how best to utilize them. It covers the architecture of Web Application Servers and transactional communication paradigms. The book is divided into 11 chapters, which cover the following: Overview of transaction processing application and system structure Software abstractions found in transaction processing systems Architecture of multitier applications and the functions of transactional middleware and database servers Queued transaction processing and its internals, with IBM's Websphere MQ and Oracle's Stream AQ as examples Business process management and its mechanisms Description of the two-phase locking function, B-tree locking and multigranularity locking used in SQL database systems and nested transaction locking System recovery and its failures Two-phase commit protocol Comparison between the tradeoffs of replicating servers versus replication resources Transactional middleware products and standards Future trends, such as cloud computing platforms, composing scalable systems using distributed computing components, the use of flash storage to replace disks and data streams from sensor devices as a source of transaction requests. The text meets the needs of systems professionals, such as IT application programmers who construct TP applications, application analysts, and product developers. The book will also be invaluable to students and novices in application programming. Complete revision of the classic "non mathematical" transaction processing reference for systems professionals. Updated to focus on the needs of transaction processing via the Internet-- the main focus of business data processing investments, via web application servers, SOA, and important new TP standards. Retains the practical, non-mathematical, but thorough conceptual basis of the first edition.

"The best introduction to transaction processing systems I have ever read." - K.Torp, ACM Computing Reviews, November 1997 Principles of Transaction Processing is a clear, concise guide for anyone involved in developing applications, evaluating products, designing systems, or engineering products. This book provides an understanding of the internals of transaction processing systems, describing how they work and how best to use them. It includes the architecture of transaction processing monitors, transactional communications paradigms, and mechanisms for recovering from transaction and system failures. Use of transaction processing systems in business, industry, and government is increasing rapidly; the emergence of electronic commerce on the Internet is creating new demands. As a result, many developers are encountering transaction processing applications for the first time and need a practical explanation of techniques. Software engineers who build and market operating systems, communications systems, programming tools, and other products used in transaction processing applications will also benefit from this thorough presentation of principles. Rich with examples, it describes commercial transaction processing systems, transactional aspects of database servers, messaging systems, Internet servers, and object-oriented systems, as well as each of their subsystems. Features: Easy-to-read descriptions of fundamentals. Real world examples illustrating key points. Focuses on practical issues faced by developers. Explains most major products and standards, including IBM's CICS, IMS, and MQSeries; X/Open's XA, STDL, and TX; BEA Systems' TUXEDO; Digital's ACMS; Transarc's Encina; AT&T/NCR's TOP END; Tandem's Pathway/TS; OMG's OTS; and Microsoft's Microsoft Transaction Server.

Transactions are a concept related to the logical database as seen from the perspective of database application programmers: a transaction is a sequence of database actions that is to be executed as an atomic unit of work. The processing of transactions on databases is a well- established area with many of its foundations having already been laid in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The unique feature of this textbook is that it bridges the gap between the theory of transactions on the logical database and the implementation of the related actions on the underlying physical database. The authors relate the logical database, which is composed of a dynamically changing set of data items with unique keys, and the underlying physical database with a set of fixed-size data and index pages on disk. Their treatment of transaction processing builds on the “do-redo-undo” recovery paradigm, and all methods and algorithms presented are carefully designed to be compatible with this paradigm as well as with write-ahead logging, steal-and-no-force buffering, and fine-grained concurrency control. Chapters 1 to 6 address the basics needed to fully appreciate transaction processing on a centralized database system within the context of our transaction model, covering topics like ACID properties, database integrity, buffering, rollbacks, isolation, and the interplay of logical locks and physical latches. Chapters 7 and 8 present advanced features including deadlock-free algorithms for reading, inserting and deleting tuples, while the remaining chapters cover additional advanced topics extending on the preceding foundational chapters, including multi-granular locking, bulk actions, versioning, distributed updates, and write-intensive transactions. This book is primarily intended as a text for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on database management in general or transaction processing in particular.

Information security is receiving a great deal of attention as computers increasingly process more and more sensitive information. A multilevel secure database management system (MLS DBMS) is designed to store, retrieve and process information in compliance with certain mandatory security requirements, essential for protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access, modification and abuse. Such systems are characterized by data objects labeled at different security levels and accessed by users cleared to those levels. Unless transaction processing modules for these systems are designed carefully, they can be exploited to leak sensitive information to unauthorized users. In recent years, considerable research has been devoted to the area of multilevel secure transactions that has impacted the design and development of trusted MLS DBMS products. Multilevel Secure Transaction Processing presents the progress and achievements made in this area. The book covers state-of-the-art research in developing secure transaction processing for popular MLS DBMS architectures, such as kernelized, replicated, and distributed architectures, and advanced transaction models such as workflows, long duration and nested models. Further, it explores the technical challenges that require future attention. Multilevel Secure Transaction Processing is an excellent reference for researchers and developers in the area of multilevel secure database systems and may be used in advanced level courses in database security, information security, advanced database systems, and transaction processing.

This is a great book! This is the book I wish I had written. --Jim Gray, Microsoft Research, recipient of 1998 A.M. Turing Award for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing researchDatabases and Transaction Processing provides a complete and clear explanation of the conceptual and engineering principles underlying the design and implementation of database and transaction processing applications. Rather than focusing on how to implement the database management system itself, this text focuses on how to build database applications. To provide a solid foundation for these principles, the book thoroughly covers the theory underlying relational databases and relational query languages.To illustrate both database and transaction processing concepts, a case study is carried throughout the book. The technical aspects of each chapter applied to the case study and the software engineering concepts required to implement the case study are discussed.In addition to the more traditional material -- relational databases, SQL, and the ACID properties of transactions -- the book provides in-depth coverage of the most current topics in database and transaction processing tec

The last decade has brought groundbreaking developments in transaction processing. This resurgence of an otherwise mature research area has spurred from the diminishing cost per GB of DRAM that allows many transaction processing workloads to be entirely memory-resident. This shift demanded a pause to fundamentally rethink the architecture of database systems. The data storage lexicon has now expanded beyond spinning disks and RAID levels to include the cache hierarchy, memory consistency models, cache coherence and write invalidation costs, NUMA regions, and coherence domains. New memory technologies promise fast non-volatile storage and expose unchartered trade-offs for transactional durability, such as exploiting byte-addressable hot and cold storage through persistent programming that promotes simpler recovery protocols. In the meantime, the plateauing single-threaded processor performance has brought massive concurrency within a single node, first in the form of multi-core, and now with many-core and heterogeneous processors. The exciting possibility to reshape the storage, transaction, logging, and recovery layers of next-generation systems on emerging hardware have prompted the database research community to vigorously debate the trade-offs between specialized kernels that narrowly focus on transaction processing performance vs. designs that permit transactionally consistent data accesses from decision support and analytical workloads. In this book, we aim to classify and distill the new body of work on transaction processing that has surfaced in the last decade to navigate researchers and practitioners through this intricate research subject.

The role of IT is becoming more prominent in people's daily lives and we are becoming increasingly dependent on computers. More and more business transactions are being automated, for example, ordering a book at an online bookstore or transferring money to a bank account in another part of the world. No matter the type of transaction, we want it to be accurate and we want to have no doubts about its outcome. Transactions are also becoming more complex, driven by new ways of conducting business and new technologies. Smartphones now allow us to conduct transactions anywhere and at anytime. Technology paradigms, such as Web 2.0 and business event processing, enable businesses to increase the dynamics of a transaction through instrumentation that captures events, analyzes the associated data, and proactively interacts with the client in order to improve the customer experience. To adapt to the increasing volume and complexity of transactions requires an ongoing assessment of the current way of supporting transactions with IT. No matter what your business is, you need to ensure that your transactions are properly completed with integrity. Wrong or incomplete results can adversely affect client loyalty, affect company profits, and lead to claims, lawsuits, or fines. Companies need to be able to rely on computer systems that are 100% reliable and guarantee transaction integrity at all times. The IBM® mainframe is such a platform. Clients that have been using an IBM mainframe are conscious of its added value. For this IBM RedguideTM publication, we surveyed a number of companies that use the IBM mainframe and we asked them to tell us its most distinguishing qualities. They answered unanimously "reliability, availability, and scalability." They also do not see an alternative for running their mission-critical business workloads other than the IBM mainframe. When we surveyed our clients, we also asked them about the future. Clearly, major future trends demand significantly smarter, faster, and bigger transaction processing systems than we have today. Some of these trends are the availability of new computing paradigms, continuing growth of the mobile channel, further integration of organizations, massive growth of unstructured and uncertain data, and increasing complexity of IT systems. IBM continues to invest in mainframe technology leadership, which protects years of client investments on this platform. Today, well-known transaction processing (TP) middleware, such as the IBM CICS, IBM IMS, IBM z/TPF, and IBM WebSphere Application Server products, and also solutions for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) are available and fully optimized on the IBM mainframe running the mission-critical business workloads of many companies the world over. In 2010, IBM announced the IBM zEnterprise® system introducing a hybrid computing platform that combines the traditional IBM mainframe capabilities and the ability to use IBM blade servers, managed by a single management software. With zEnterprise, you can significantly reduce the complexity of your IT and achieve better service levels, while continuing to benefit from traditional mainframe strengths in transaction processing.