Additional Background Reading

• Our publications
• The JTA spec at Oracle (Sun) is the Java mapping of XA distributed transaction technology.
• A nice series of articles on transactions (by IBM):
  • Understanding transaction pitfalls
  • Transaction strategies: Models and strategies overview
  • Transaction strategies: The API Layer strategy
• Distributed Transaction Processing: The XA Specification by the X/Open Group: You will need this to understand the depth of XA.
• Nice background reading on XA - XA Exposed: can be used to understand why XA is the way it is.
• Transaction Processing Concepts and Techniques: this book is the bible of transaction systems.
• Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems: another classic book - mainly explaining database transaction theory.
• Composite Transactions: Guy Pardon's PhD thesis.
• Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: Pat Helland (Amazon/Microsoft) outlines his particular view on distributed transactions (and this actually matches our XTP and TCC aproaches!) - it's nice to see that what Atomikos does is validated by the large-scale practices of Amazon.