Transaction Management

Abstract

Much of the work surrounding the design and development of enterprise applications involves decisions about how to coordinate the flow of persistent data. This includes when and where to cache data, when to apply it to a persistent store (typically the database), how to resolve simultaneous attempts to access the same data, and how to resolve errors that might occur when an action occurs that violates a constraint in the database. A reliable database is capable of handling these issues at a low level—in the database tier—but these same issues can exist in the middle (application server) and client tiers as well, and typically require special application logic. For example, a database provides built-in concurrency control through pessimistic locking support, whereas an application may choose to use an optimistic locking strategy to achieve a result more optimized for performance.