Transaction Processing - Implementations

Implementations

Standard transaction-processing software, notably 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 well-known (and open) industry standard is the X/Open Distributed Transaction Processing (DTP) (see 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.

A modern transaction processing implementation combines elements of both object-oriented persistence with traditional transaction monitoring. One such implementation is the commercial DTS/S1 product from Obsidian Dynamics, or the open-source product db4o.

The term 'Extreme Transaction Processing' (XTP) has been 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.