Is there life outside transactions?: writing the transaction processing book

ABSTRACT

In this article I will reflect on the writing of "Transaction Processing -- Concepts and Techniques" [1], which appeared at Morgan Kaufmann Publishers in 1992. The process of writing had many aspects of a typical software project: In the end, the book was more than twice as thick as we had planned, it covered only 3/4 of the material that we wanted to cover, and completing it took much longer than we had anticipated. Nevertheless, it was a moderate success and served as a basic reference for many developers in the industry for at least 10 years after its publication. It was translated to Chinese and Japanese, and occasionally one still finds references to it -- despite the fact that (apart from simple bug fixes) there has been no technical update of the material, and the book deals with "outdated" subjects like transaction processing and client/server architectures.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jim Gray , Andreas Reuter, Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1992
• 2: David A. Patterson , John L. Hennessy, Computer architecture: a quantitative approach, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1990
• 3: Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Operating systems: design and implementation, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1987
• 4: Spector, A. Z. 1991, Open, Distributed Transaction Processing with Encina, International Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems, Monterey, CA.
• 5: C. Mohan , Don Haderle , Bruce Lindsay , Hamid Pirahesh , Peter Schwarz, ARIES: a transaction recovery method supporting fine-granularity locking and partial rollbacks using write-ahead logging, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.17 n.1, p.94-162, March 1992 [doi>10.1145/128765.128770]
• 6: Tandem-TMF. 1991, Tandem's Transaction Monitoring Facility (TMF) -- Introduction, 12014, Tandem Computers, Cupertino, CA.
• 7: Transarc-Encina. 1991, Encina Transaction Processing System, TP Monitor, TP-00-D146, Transarc Corp. Pittsburgh, PA.
• 8: Panayiotis K. Chrysanthis , Krithi Ramamritham, ACTA: a framework for specifying and reasoning about transaction structure and behavior, Proceedings of the 1990 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.194-203, May 23-26, 1990, Atlantic City, New Jersey, United States
• 9: Klein, J. 1991, Advanced Rule Driven Transaction Management, 36^th IEEE Compcon.
• 10: Jim Gray , Leslie Lamport, Consensus on transaction commit, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.31 n.1, p.133-160, March 2006 [doi>10.1145/1132863.1132867]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.2 HISTORY OF COMPUTING

General Terms:
Design, Performance, Reliability, Standardization

Keywords:
fault tolerance, software architecture, transaction processing