A Transaction Specification and Management Environment (TSME) is a transaction processing system toolkit that supports the definition and construction of application-specific extended transaction models (ETMs). The TSME provides a transaction specification language that allows a transaction model designer to create implementation-independent specifications of extended transactions. In addition, the TSME provides a programmable transaction management mechanism that assembles and configures a run-time environment to support specified ETMs. The authors discuss the TSME in the context of a distributed object management system (DOMS), and describe specifications of extended transactions and corresponding configurations of transaction management mechanisms.>

In many application areas the information that may be of interest to a user is stored under the control of multiple, autonomous database systems. To support global transactions in a multidatabase environment, we must coordinate the activities of multiple Database Management Systems that were designed for independent, stand-alone operation. The autonomy and heterogeneity of these systems present a major impediment to the direct adaptation of transaction management mechanisms developed for distributed databases. In this paper we introduce a transaction model designed for a multidatabase environment. A multidatabase transaction is defined by providing a set of (local) sub-transactions, together with their precedence and dataflow requirements. Additionally, the transaction designer may specify failure atomicity and execution atomicity requirements of the multidatabase transaction. These high-level specifications are then used by the scheduler of a multidatabase transaction to assure that its execution satisfies the constraints imposed by the semantics of the application. Uncontrolled interleaving of multidatabase transactions may lead to the violation of interdatabase integrity constraints. We discuss the issues involved in a concurrent execution of multidatabase transactions and propose a new concurrency control correctness criterion that is less restrictive than global serializability. We also show how the multidatabase SQL can be extended to allow the user to specify multidatabase transactions in a nonprocedural way.