High Performance Transaction Systems

Book excerpt: This Lecture Notes volume is based on the "International Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems" held in the Asilomar Conference Center, September 28-30, 1987. Many of the problems identified during the workshop are liable to determine the future development of transaction systems and distributed high performance systems in general for many years to come. So the organizers of HPTS '87 felt encouraged to collect the papers presented at the workshop in order to make them accessible to a wider audience of interested developers and researchers. Since some of the contributions represented work in progress, the authors agreed to prepare revised and updated versions of their papers for this publication. This accounts for the long delay between the event itself and the publication, but on the other hand it provides the reader with a state-of-the-art account of transaction processing topics. The book is organized according to the major sections of the workshop. In the network section the reader finds an analysis of two of the major "paradigms" in networking, ISO/OSI and SNA, from the perspective of transaction processing. In the next section four different transaction processing and database systems are described: Model 204 - a database management system marketed by Computer Corporation of America, Tandem's NonStop SQL, Citicorp's transaction processing system and ALCS, which basically is a version of TPF running under MVS/XA. The section on architectural issues contains four very different contributions which are fairly representative of the type of problems in transaction systems investigated in the research community. Finally, performance evaluations and system comparisons are presented.