Transactiemanager

Transactiemanager, often referred to as a transaction manager, is a software component that coordinates the execution of operations across one or more transactional resources to ensure data integrity and the ACID properties. It maintains a transactional context, provides mechanisms to begin, commit, and roll back transactions, and enforces isolation levels while recording decisions and recovery information in logs.

The primary duties of a transactiemanager include enlisting resource managers (such as databases, message queues, or file systems) in a transaction, coordinating two-phase commit or other commit protocols, and handling failure scenarios to recover in-doubt transactions. It abstracts resource-specific details from the application, allowing developers to reason about business logic without manually managing low-level commit sequences. In distributed environments, the manager often supports global transactions that span multiple resources and machines, using a global transaction identifier and prepared/commit phases to ensure atomic cross-resource updates.

Architecturally, a transactiemanager typically sits between application logic and resource managers, exposing APIs to start, finalize, or roll back transactions. It may rely on recovery managers and transaction logs to resume unfinished work after crashes. Common standards and interfaces include Java Transaction API (JTA) with XA resource support in Java environments and similar mechanisms in other platforms (for example, System.Transactions in .NET). In modern microservice architectures, alternatives such as sagas and compensating transactions are sometimes used to achieve eventual consistency when distributed transaction coordination is impractical.

See also: ACID, two-phase commit, distributed transactions, Saga pattern, transaction processing, transaction log.