Chapter 3

Transaction Processing Application Architecture

3.1 Introduction

From the end user’s point of view, a transaction processing (TP) application is a serial processor of requests. It is a server that appears to execute an infinite loop whose body is an ACID transaction, such as the following pseudo-program:

Do Forever

   /* the body of this loop is a transaction */

   receive a request

   do the requested work

   send a reply (optional)

End

However, as we saw in Chapter 1, the behind-the-scenes reality is more complex. Usually, the user is executing on a front-end machine that is remote from the server machine that executes the transactions. Often the server is itself a distributed system, primarily so that it can scale up to handle a large ...

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