Architect Consultant blog

I came accross this article about managing transactions within a SOA environment. There Vinay Singla mentions 4 techniques: 1) Perform the operations that support transactions before the operations that don’t support transactions (technique 2 can help) 2) Use compensating transactions (services must support compensating capabilities) 3) Break the transaction into multiple decoupled transactions 4) Execute the transaction as a long-running transaction Maybe you think of WS-Transaction and WS-Reliability but these standards have not yet been mature enough. Another technique not mentioned is the use of Functional/Technical maintenance. In this case when a step is not fulfilled, it will be send to a queue. This will be picked up by maintenance to correct the problem. I always fancy the most simple solution that decreases complexity for situations that may occur only once in a while, but this depends of course on the requirements.