Analyzing And Formalizing Dependencies In Generalized Transaction Structures

Modern information systems require advanced transaction models providing means to describe complex activities such as transactional workflows. Complex activities consist of sets of transactions which are interrelated, i.e., there are dependencies among several transactions. We analyze different kinds of dependencies and present an extended formal framework (based on ACTA) for describing advanced transaction models. We introduce the notion of transaction closures as a generalization of nested transactions which captures different orthogonal dependencies such as abort and object visibility dependencies, and explicitly show how these dependencies work together. The formal framework is demonstrated by formalizing detached transactions known from the area of active database systems. 1 Introduction Advanced transaction models are the basis for realizing complex activities in information systems. Traditionally, such models base on the idea of nesting transactions. Nested transactions (Mos85..