Coordinating Multi-Transaction Activities

Data processing applications must often execute collections of related transactions. We propose a model for structuring and coordinating these multi-transaction activities. The model includes mechanisms for communication between transactions, for compensating transactions after an activity has failed, for dynamic creation and binding of activities, and for checkpointing the progress of an activity. THIS IS A REVISED VERSION OF TECHNICAL REPORT CSTR-297-90, DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, FEBRUARY 1990. A SHORTER VERSION OF THIS PAPER APPEARED AS ‘‘Modeling Long-Running Activities as Nested Sagas,’’ IN Database Engineering, Vol. 14, No. 1, March, 1991. Coordinating Multi-Transaction Activities Hector Garcia-Molina Dept. of Computer Science Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544 Dieter Gawlick Johannes Klein Karl Kleissner Digital Equipment Corporation Mountain View, CA 94040 Kenneth Salem Dept. of Computer Science University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742