Principles of Transaction Processing is a comprehensive guide to developing applications, designing systems, and evaluating engineering products. The book provides detailed discussions of the internal workings of transaction processing systems, and it discusses how these systems work and how best to utilize them. It covers the architecture of Web Application Servers and transactional communication paradigms.

The book is divided into 11 chapters, which cover the following:

• Overview of transaction processing application and system structure
• Software abstractions found in transaction processing systems
• Architecture of multitier applications and the functions of transactional middleware and database servers
• Queued transaction processing and its internals, with IBM’s Websphere MQ and Oracle’s Stream AQ as examples
• Business process management and its mechanisms
• Description of the two-phase locking function, B-tree locking and multigranularity locking used in SQL database systems and nested transaction locking
• System recovery and its failures
• Two-phase commit protocol
• Comparison between the tradeoffs of replicating servers versus replication resources
• Transactional middleware products and standards
• Future trends, such as cloud computing platforms, composing scalable systems using distributed computing components, the use of flash storage to replace disks and data streams from sensor devices as a source of transaction requests.

The text meets the needs of systems professionals, such as IT application programmers who construct TP applications, application analysts, and product developers. The book will also be invaluable to students and novices in application programming.

Principles of Transaction Processing is a clear, concise guide for anyone involved in developing applications, evaluating products, designing systems, or engineering products. This book provides an understanding of the internals of transaction processing systems, describing how they work and how best to use them. It includes the architecture of Web Application Servers, transactional communications paradigms, and mechanisms for recovering from transaction and system failures.

The use of transaction processing systems has changed in the years since publication of the first edition. Electronic commerce has become a major focus for business data processing investments, from banking and stock purchase on the web, to eBay auctions, to corporate database management. New standards, new technology and products, and new languages allow web services and SOA to become the leading style of design for enterprise applications. And with the help of this book and its rich examples, you will be able to produce the state-of-the-art applications discussed within.

For more information check out Eric Newcomer’s blog:

What we Learned Writing the Second Edition of the TP Book