Access to Legacy Applications and Data

Why Use Transactions?

Two changes in the use of information technology make the increased deployment of transaction management systems compelling for many organizations:

The growing demand to use the Internet and intranets for exchanging secure information, including financial exchanges through online commerce
The increasing trend of running multiple reusable software components within one application, including components used to access databases

As stated, the explosive growth of the Internet and organizational intranets has presented new opportunities for doing business over data networks. The elemental expression of doing business—the exchange of money for goods or services—requires making updates to more than one database for each exchange.

In addition, software design is increasingly shifting toward a component model, in which applications are made up of many code segments operating independently of each other. An application often allows more than one component to concurrently update one or more databases. Concurrent updates require a transaction manager, in order to ensure transaction integrity while still optimizing performance.

For more information, see Data Access and Transactions in this book.