An approach to successful online transaction processing applications

Online transaction processing applications are playing an increasingly important role in corporate activities. While transaction processing applications can be characterized as a large number of users concurrently accessing and updating very large databases, there is a fundamental set of generic user requirements which such applications must satisfy to be successful. This paper shows that with system hardware and software architecture designed specifically to support online transaction processing, the system is able to fully meet these application requirements. Furthermore, by implementing applications on such a system, the impact of these requirements on the development process is minimized; this in turn reduces the time, cost, and complexity of developing and maintaining transaction processing applications. Following a brief discussion on the nature of online transaction processing, this paper discusses the user's generic transaction processing requirements, the characteristics of online transaction processing application programs, and how a system's hardware and software architecture can be designed to meet the requirements of transaction processing. The SYNAPSE N + 1 TM System is used as an example architecture.