2.2.2 Transaction Processing Services

Transaction Processing Services, defined in Transaction Processing Services Overview [MS-TPSOD], provides services for systems that require transactions to be coordinated in a distributed system. Transaction processing enables information processing systems, such as databases or secure web services, to change the state of resources so that either all of the changes happen or none of the changes happens. Resources can be data, such as rows in a database, or logical entities, such as the execution state of a program.

In transaction processing, multiple individual operations are consolidated as a single indivisible operation known as an atomic transaction. If at least one of the operations fails, the transaction processing services roll back all operations in the transaction. Rollback guarantees that the system data can consistently be restored to the known state that it was in before the transaction began. However, a transaction cannot be rolled back once it successfully completes.

The transaction processing protocols are listed in [MS-TPSOD] section 2.2.