Transaction Support for Design Processes —Requirements, Concepts, and Realization Primitives

During the last decade or so, concepts for database support for non-standard applications like CAD or CASE were developed. Simultaneously, it turned out that the classical transaction concept does not sufficiently support those design applications. New transaction models —such as longlived transactions or cooperative transactions— have been specified for this application domain. This paper first describes common requirements for design transactions. It then surveys proposals that address these requirements. Furthermore, commonalities of the proposed approaches are factorized and a set of primitives for the realization of design transaction management is proposed.