A

ACID properties: The basic transaction properties of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability. Atomicity ensures that all the updates completed under a specific transaction are committed and made durable, or that they get aborted and rolled back to their previous state. Consistency means that a transaction is a correct transformation of the system state, preserving the state invariants. Isolation protects concurrent transactions from seeing each other's partial and uncommitted results, which might create inconsistencies in the application state. Resource managers use transaction-based synchronization protocols to isolate the uncommitted work of active transactions. Durability means that committed updates to managed resources, such as a database record, survive failures, including communication failures, process failures, and server system failures. Transactional logging allows you to recover the durable state after disk media failures.
Active Desktop: A technology that allows you to include HTML documents, ActiveX® controls, and Java applets on your desktop. Active Desktop™ was first delivered in Microsoft® Internet Explorer 4.0.
Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI): Microsoft's interface for directory access, an open initiative endorsed by many key industry vendors. ADSI abstracts the capabilities of directory services from different network providers to present a single set of directory service interfaces for accessing and managing network resources. For more information, see "Active Directory" under "Networking Services" in the Microsoft Platform SDK.
Active Messaging: Predecessor to Collaboration Data Objects. Active Messaging offered less functionality than CDO, and essentially was a high-level object library based on MAPI.
Active Server Pages (ASP): An open application environment in which HTML pages, server-side scripts, and ActiveX components are combined to create Web-based applications. ASP is an ISAPI application.
ActiveX: Microsoft's brand name for the technologies that enable interoperability among applications using the Component Object Model (COM). ActiveX technology includes Automation.
ActiveX Data Objects (ADO): A collection of data access objects within a hierarchical object library. ADO enables you to write a client application to access and manipulate data in a database server through a provider (database interface) such as Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0. For more information, see http://www.microsoft.com/data.
activity: (Microsoft Exchange Server Routing) An activity defines what happens in the routing map at a particular state. Examples are "SendMessage", "Goto X", "Wait", and so on.
(Performance Tracking application) An activity in this application is an assignment, test, or other accomplishment for which an individual can earn a score.
administrator: In the Performance Tracking application, administrators manage data about persons in the database, create groups and assign individuals to them, and perform other functions necessary to keep the application running smoothly and securely.
ADO: See ActiveX Data Objects.
ADSI: See Active Directory Service Interfaces.
application object: The top-level object in an application's object hierarchy. The application object allows Web pages in the same virtual directory to share information and settings.
arena: A BDG-specific term that represents both the data and the business-specific terminology of a single business in one or more national languages.
ASP: See Active Server Pages.
atomicity: A feature of a transaction that indicates that either all actions of the transaction happen or none happen.
attribute: XML structural construct. A name-value pair within a tagged element that modifies certain features of the element. For XML, all attribute values must be enclosed in quotation marks.
auditor: In the Performance Tracking application, an application user who is assigned to a group in an auditing role. Auditors have read-only access to group data.
automatic transaction: A transaction that the Microsoft Transaction Server run-time environment creates for an object, based on the object's transaction attribute.
Automation: A COM-based technology (formerly known as OLE Automation) that makes it possible for one application to either manipulate objects implemented in another application, or to expose objects so they can be manipulated.
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