Transactions and NoSQL - not reinventing the wheel!

It's nice to see some NoSQL solutions recognising that they need transactions (or extended transactions) and rediscovering the work that the transactions community (ourselves included) have been working on for a few decades! This presentation is interesting, but frustrating in a few places, e.g., the discussion around the viability of nested transactions for long duration interactions, in general the discussion around Sagas, and the Q&A at the end where the glossing over of technical aspects during the talk really lead to confusion.

However, that aside, it's not a bad overview of the needs for long duration, compensation based transactions and references a few of the important papers and research in this space going back several decades. Of course if you've been reading this blog long enough or watching the work we've been doing for a while, you'll know about others, including:

• the compensation REST transactions work;
• a history of extended transactions;
• a comparison of two of the original standards efforts in the area of compensation transactions;
• a couple of presentations on early standards effort around Web Services and transactions;
• an overview of the wider expanse of work that has been done around extended transactions, workflow, messaging, choreography etc.

The reference to the Sagas pattern that is mentioned, but forgotten, in the presentation I mentioned originally can be found here. It's nice to see that at least in the case of this NoSQL implementation, the engineers are willing to see what's gone before and learn from it. And if you want to look at implementations (and frameworks) that do much of this already, then take a look at JBossTS - without you having to write your own do/undo log!