Architectural Patterns

Compensating transaction pattern

This is a transaction that undoes the effects of another completed transaction. In a distributed system, it can be very difficult to achieve strong transactional consistency. Compensating transactions are a way to achieve consistency by using a series of smaller and individual transactions that can be undone at each step.

The problem description—a typical business operation consists of a series of separate steps. While these steps are being performed, the overall view of the system state might be inconsistent, but when the operation has completed and all of the steps have been executed, the system should become consistent again. A challenge in the eventual consistency model is how to handle a step that has ...