Beyond ACID: transactions management, in theory and practice

Transactions are the software building blocks of enterprise applications, but not all transactional systems are created equally. This talk covers the basics of what transactions are, why they are essential to building reliable enterprise software, the fundamental properties of transactions, and how transactions are supported and implemented in popular frameworks such as Java EE and Spring.

Murphy's Law states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And in enterprise applications, there are lots of things that can go wrong – disks fill up or fail, systems crash, network connections go down, clumsy people trip over power cords. While you can't prevent failures from happening, you can prevent failures from corrupting your application data, and transactions are the standard way to structure application logic to enable reliable error recovery in the face of inevitable failures.

This talk covers what transactions are, the various participants in local and distributed transactions, the role of transactions in enterprise technologies such as Java EE, Spring, and Web Services, how user code communicates its transactional requirements, and the behind-the-scenes magic how enterprise frameworks hide most of the implementation of transactions from applications.

About Brian Goetz

Brian Goetz has been a professional software developer for 20 years. He is the author of over 75 articles on software development, and his book, Java Concurrency In Practice, was published in May 2006 by Addison-Wesley. He serves on the JCP Expert Groups for JSRs 166 (concurrency utilities), 107 (caching), and 305 (annotations for safety analysis). He is a frequent presenter at JavaOne, OOPSLA, JavaPolis, SDWest, and the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium Tour. Brian is a Sr. Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

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