Cooperative Transactions in Interoperable Environments

So far, cooperative transactions and interoperable (multidatabase) transactions are rather independent research topics. On the one hand, various cooperative transaction models have been proposed in the literature. They attempt to weaken the traditional ACID properties to maximize sharing among on-going transactions. On the other hand, researches toward interoperable transaction management have been related to the local autonomy issues. In supporting cooperative transactions in interoperable environments, there is yet another issue concerning heterogeneity among transaction models themselves. However, this last issue has not yet attracted enough attention. In this paper, we present our approach in which transactional behavior is encapsulated into the abstraction called transaction ally (TA). The approach is based on the observation that abstraction (encapsulation) and type polymorphism, the two important properties of the object-oriented diagram, are essential to achieving interoperability with respect to data model heterogeneity. In our framework, TAs are typed and TA types have properties similar to type polymorphism. This makes a step closer toward transaction model interoperability.