ACTA: a framework for specifying and reasoning about transaction structure and behavior

Abstract

Recently, a number of extensions to the traditional transaction model have been proposed to support new information-intensive applications such as CAD/CAM and software development. However, these extended models capture only a subset of interactions that can be found in such applications, and represent only some of the points within the spectrum of interactions possible in competitive and cooperative environments. ACTA is a formalizable framework developed for characterizing the whole spectrum of interactions. The ACTA framework is not yet another transaction model, but is intended to unify the existing models. ACTA allows for specifying the structure and the behavior of transactions as well as for reasoning about the concurrency and recovery properties of the transactions. In ACTA, the semantics of interactions are expressed in terms of transactions' effects on the commit and abort of other transactions and on objects' state and concurrency status (i.e., synchronization state). Its ability to capture the semantics of previously proposed transaction models is indicative of its generality. The reasoning capabilities of this framework have also been tested by using the framework to study the properties of a new model that is derived by combining two existing transaction models.