A historic survey of transaction management from flat to grid transactions

This is a working paper for the XTraConServe (XTC) Project, which aims to develop concepts and support facilities for a Business Transaction Framework (BTF) that utilizes abstract transactional constructs (ATCs) to provide a generic foundation for support of complex transactional services in contract-driven inter-organizational business interactions that rely on dynamically composed web services. In this paper, we investigate the classical transaction models and the key concepts and techniques with regard to transaction management. Some well-known work that has been or is being done in different application domains is reviewed following a time line, which reveals the development of transactions from the simplest nostructure model to the complex framework with hierarchical or layered structures.