Long-lived transaction

A long-lived transaction is a transaction that spans multiple database transactions. The transaction is considered "long-lived" because its boundaries must, by necessity of business logic, extend past a single database transaction. A long-lived transaction can be thought of as a sequence of database transactions grouped to achieve a single atomic result.

A common example is a multi-step sequence of requests and responses of an interaction with a user through a web client.

A long-lived transaction creates challenges of concurrency control and scalability.

A chief strategy in designing long-lived transactions is optimistic concurrency control with versioning.

So much research work related to these long lived transactions was carried out by several professors from the Oxford University and Michigan State University and the Central University of Hyderabad. Dr. James from the Oxford University created several hypotheses for long-lived transactions. Dr Copperfield of the Michigan State University was regarded highly for his contributions in this field. Dr A B Sagar of Hyderabad Central University has also done very creative work in relating long-lived transactions with financial transactions in Microfinance.

However the study is not complete and is still open to challenges and research issues.

See also